THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 RIVERSIDE
 
 THE SECOND PERSON 
 SINGULAR 
 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 BY 
 
 ALICE MEYNELL 
 
 SECOND IMPRESSION 
 
 HUMPHREY MILFORD 
 
 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW COPENHAGEN 
 
 NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN 
 
 BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS SHANGHAI PEKING 
 
 1922
 
 
 EN6LAND.
 
 TO CELIA CLARK
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Superfluous Kings .... 7 
 
 Strictly an Elizabethan Lyrist 
 
 
 12 
 
 ' A Modern Poetess ' 
 
 
 18 
 
 To Italy with Evelyn 
 
 
 
 
 . 25 
 
 Waterfalls 
 
 
 
 
 . 31 
 
 A Tomb in Bayswater 
 
 
 
 
 . 37 
 
 A Corrupt Following 
 
 
 
 
 • 42 
 
 The Swan of Lichfield 
 
 
 
 
 ■ 49 
 
 Joanna Baillie 
 
 
 
 
 . 56 
 
 The Classic Novelist 
 
 
 
 
 . 62 
 
 A Hundred Years Ago 
 
 
 
 
 . 68 
 
 Thomas Lovell Beddoes 
 
 
 
 
 • 75 
 
 George Darley 
 
 
 
 
 . 82 
 
 Sydney Dobell 
 
 
 
 
 87 
 
 Coventry Patmore . 
 
 
 
 
 . 94 
 
 Poetry and Childhood 
 
 
 
 
 . no 
 
 George Meredith . 
 
 
 
 
 , 117 
 
 Pessimism in Fiction 
 
 
 
 
 , 122 
 
 GlACINTO GALLINA 
 
 
 
 
 127 
 
 The Second Person Singi 
 
 jlar . 
 
 
 
 133
 
 The papers which follow have been chosen from those 
 of Mrs. Meynell's literary essays that have not yet been 
 reprinted in book-form. The selection has been made 
 at the instance of the Oxford University Press.
 
 SUPERFLUOUS KINGS 
 
 Which had superfluous kings for messengers 
 Not many moons gone by. 
 
 Antony and Cleopatra. 
 
 As the kings lag, and then pass away from the 
 stage of the world, many men will ask what there 
 is to regret. Assuredly nothing, if not royalty in 
 the mind of Shakespeare. Mankind will in time 
 probably forget or deny that there was ever any- 
 thing in the life of the world answering to Shake- 
 speare's royalty in Perdita, or to his princeliness in 
 Arviragus and Guiderius, or to his kingliness in 
 Lear, or to his glory in Cleopatra. It may be so, as 
 to the world ; there may have been nothing thus 
 answerable. But there was Shakespeare. 
 
 And our regrets in regard to him cover all his 
 regalities — the hidden and hereditary and un- 
 conscious, and the conscious and braggart and 
 manifest : Perdita's dignity among the romps, and 
 her sportive disputes as to Art and Nature among 
 the clowns, her unflushed composure amid the 
 junketings, and also Lear's loud and indignant 
 death. The splendour of Shakespeare's veneration 
 for kings is perhaps deeper where the kingliness — 
 the blood of it — is unrevealed, as in the shepherdess 
 of The Winter's Tale, for here it is matter of Shake- 
 speare's faith. So with the brothers of Imogen who,
 
 8 Superfluous Kings 
 
 by the way — and not merely by the way — like 
 her, discuss flowers — ' Then to arms ! ' They too 
 have the implicit distinction, unknown to the 
 world of their exile, but known to Shakespeare, who 
 is aware of their blood and lineage. Here, and in 
 The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare makes his resolute 
 and implicit act of belief in the blood of kings. 
 
 In Lear that faith suffers outrage and defies it. 
 Many years ago the great actor, Rossi, who did not 
 gain in England such honour as was rendered to 
 Salvini — I fear because his physical personal dig- 
 nity was not so obvious as Salvini's — played King 
 Lear in Italian. But there was one cry, one royal 
 proclamation, that could not be removed from the 
 English. So Rossi said ' every inch ' in English. 
 It needed Shakespeare's word to vindicate Shake- 
 speare's royalism. (One might make sport of any kind 
 of translation: say ' ogni centimetro' — 'every centi- 
 metre a king ' is good farce.) No Italian will serve ; 
 the Latin mind has not this degree of imaginative 
 reverence, nor has the Italian language the faculty 
 of giving sudden greatness to a customary word. 
 
 But Shakespeare, conceiving for royalty not only 
 ' the beauteous Majesty of Denmark ', and the 
 ' courteous action ' of the dead — ' being so majcsti- 
 cal ' — and the dignity of Hermione's daughter, and 
 the tempest of Lear's elemental tragedy, will not 
 consent lo touch us with nothing more than pity 
 and terror. He confronts us with the uttermost of 
 pride of life in the royalty he sings ; confronts us —
 
 Superfluous Kings 9 
 
 no, rather brings us to our knees before the arrogant 
 splendour he conceives : 
 
 Where souls do couch on flowers, we'll hand in hand, 
 And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze. 
 
 It is the pride of life and the pride of death. Only 
 hand in hand with a queen does Antony venture on 
 the prophecy of that immortal vanity. If to him 
 are given the most surprising lines in any of the 
 tragedies, it is only as the lover of a queen that he 
 has the right to them. To him is assigned that 
 startling word, the incomparable word of amorous 
 and tender ceremony — ' Egypt '. 
 
 I am dying, Egypt, dying. 
 
 That territorial name, murmured to his love in the 
 hour of death, and in her arms — I know not in the 
 records of all genius any other such august farewell. 
 Lear's word is outdone here. Lear a king in every 
 inch of his aged body, but Cleopatra a queen in 
 every league of her ancient realm. Has not majesty 
 spoken its one unexpected word in the mouth of 
 such a lover ? 
 
 Superfluous kings — Shakespeare's irony could 
 find no other adjective so overcharged with in- 
 solence as this. Kings must be as he conceived 
 them in order to that antithesis : 
 
 Superfluous kings for messengers. 
 
 But an antithesis more complete than that of down- 
 fall and of servitude is that of mortality. The
 
 io Superfluous Kings 
 
 humiliation of the beaten monarch leaves the 
 Shakespearian conception of kingliness face to face 
 with the mere fortunes of war ; the derision of the 
 word ' superfluous ' implies, in reversal, an inalien- 
 able dignity ; so in the act of dying, the visible act, 
 done in life ; so with ' sad stories of the death of 
 kings '. The final contradiction is not here ; but 
 in the grave itself, in the hidden burial, out of the 
 sight of the populace : it needs the utmost of 
 Shakespeare's passion of royalty to answer to that 
 depth. And here is poetry, not by him, but wonder- 
 fully worthy of him, that tells us of 
 
 High-born dust 
 In vaults, thin courts of poor unflattered kings. 
 
 Shakespeare only, besides Young, could have 
 written this. 
 
 Literature, then, will lose this glory, and with 
 this glory this humiliation. Who will say which 
 is greater, the thesis or the antithesis ? But they 
 cannot be parted to be compared. There they arc, 
 in our national literature, and cannot be effaced. 
 But who shall hinder their becoming, for the 
 student, first a matter of mere literary interest, then 
 a matter of mere literary curiosity, next a matter 
 of some new derision ? (We need no new derisions : 
 our wits are apt to mockery.) Is it well that any 
 one of Shakespeare's many passions should come 
 under our frigid inspection, to be examined so ? 
 
 When kings are in fact superfluous, Shake-
 
 Superfluous Kings n 
 
 speare's great word ' superfluous ' will be cancelled 
 out ; when kings are no longer flattered, Young's 
 great word ' unflattered ' will be a futile word ; 
 when there are no full assiduous courts, the 
 1 thin courts ' will suggest no spectres. Regret is 
 for Shakespeare, as has been said ; not for Saul, or 
 Louis the Fourteenth, or Charles the Twelfth. But, 
 short of Shakespeare's devotion, there will be some 
 sentiment damaged. When the mortality of kings 
 is no sharper sarcasm than is the mortality we all 
 inherit, then the lamps and the gold that enshrine 
 the bony heads of Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar 
 at Cologne may take their place, outside of cathe- 
 drals, with the unnamed relics of the shepherds who 
 preceded the kings to the manger. 
 
 Shakespeare's greatest splendour, then, that so 
 shines down the splendour of history and the world, 
 is under sentence, and under sentence his greatest 
 compassion, and under sentence his greatest terror, 
 and under sentence his greatest irony. And I have 
 placed at the head of these pages a word of neither 
 terror nor compassion, because the word of irony 
 implies the rest.
 
 STRICTLY AN ELIZABETHAN LYRIST 
 
 England has little primitive poetry, because 
 the Reformers not only broke graven images but 
 destroyed libraries, and gave some centuries of 
 minor literature to the flames. We have much ado 
 in raking together a few stones of their hacking and 
 scattering, but fire has saved their posterity the 
 trouble of trying to restore an annihilated national 
 poetry. Our writers, then (with the obvious 
 exceptions), begin soon after the invention of 
 movable type, and so modern are they that the 
 sixteenth century must serve us for comparative 
 antiquity. The language was mobile between Eliz- 
 abeth and James, tuned by the hands of the masters 
 whose lives lasted from one developing time into 
 another, and who were themselves England, having 
 history in common with their country. 
 
 But Robert Greene was absolutely an Eliz- 
 abethan — man and boy. He was born in the year 
 of the Queen's accession, and died while she was 
 dancing, an old man of thirty-four, dropsical and 
 horrible, full of repentance, as were then all of his 
 manner of life when they had an illness sufficiently 
 long to give them time. Greene died from too much 
 banqueting, apparently upon the crudest luxuries, 
 but his sorry death-bed gave him room for ample 
 self-reproach, and doubtless Christopher Marlowe
 
 Strictly an Elizabethan Lyrist 13 
 
 also would have left a record of his repentance had 
 the manner of his departure, at even an earlier age 
 than his friend's, been less violent. In later years 
 Carew asked pardon, with many cries, for the 
 greater number of his verses ; and, indeed, during 
 these two bright centuries you may hear, if you turn 
 your car that way, the loud lamentation of poet 
 after dying poet, a single outcry at intervals ; not 
 a death-bed without the clamour that closed the 
 song. It is a parting cry, so poignant and sudden 
 that the air rings with it even while the succeeding 
 singer is heard to be preluding, undaunted for the 
 present. Greene had not a little to repent of in his 
 actions, but nothing to retract in his songs ; there- 
 fore, the reader who has not beheld his life — his 
 wife was left at ' six and seven ', as he phrases it, 
 and certainly very forlorn — has little to do with the 
 grief, pain, and fear of the closing scene, and may 
 well be content with the sweetness of the songs. 
 They were sweet and single, like tunes unharmon- 
 ized. Without following the fashion of using the 
 terms of one art to describe another, we may permit 
 ourselves this mere imagery : the single note of 
 music to represent the sixteenth-century lyric, 
 harmonics for the seventeenth, counterpoint for the 
 nineteenth. Greene's famous ' Sephestia's Song to 
 Her Child ' (by far his best) is the only lyric in 
 which so much as two notes are to be heard ; and 
 the double string makes the sound more human. 
 It is not human to be single as the songs of
 
 14 Strictly an Elizabethan Lyrist 
 
 Greene are single ; the fading of pleasure, the 
 cruelty of beauty, the inconstancy of love, the 
 happy lot of the shepherd, and the cares of kings — 
 each thing, one at a time, is so unaccompanied that 
 vou wonder how a primitive poet should have had 
 time to reject all checking, mingling, and qualifying 
 thoughts together. For it is hardly youth, hardly 
 inexperience that this simplicity suggests, but 
 rather a mind made up, a mind bent on creating 
 other conditions than those which govern an actual 
 world of which the poet has somewhat grown 
 tired. 
 
 ' Scphestia's Song ', however, has the thrill of 
 sweetly jarring notes in the lines that tell the part- 
 ing of father and mother over their laughing child — 
 lines that seem to have haunted the car, if not the 
 mind, of Blake in his own song of birth. Blake's 
 verse has a tempestuous and threatening spiritual 
 wildness of which Greene did not. know the lan- 
 guage ; and it is only in the leaping metre, the 
 clamour of the rhymes that seem striving to be 
 heard above a deafening childish noise, that the 
 two songs have so much likeness. 
 
 The wanton smiled, father wept, 
 Mother cried, baby leapt ; 
 More he crowed, more we cried. 
 
 There is a vociferation, a distraction, and a dand- 
 ling of the child, and you hear also the crying that 
 the mother is seeking to still with her recital of that 
 late scene of sorrow — ' Weep not, my wanton '.
 
 Strictly an Elizabethan Lyrist 15 
 
 Next in beauty to ' Scphcstia's Song ' comes, 
 perhaps, 'The Praise of Faunia ' : 
 
 Ah, were she pitiful as she is fair, 
 Or but as mild as she is seeming so, 
 
 is a beginning that sounds like a less grave, less 
 strong, and less masculine Shakespeare sonnet. 
 There is sweet line after line in this poem, and many 
 such a phrase as ' the morning-singer's swelling 
 throat ' and ' When she sings, all singers else be 
 still ! ' But the poem is famous chiefly, it may be 
 guessed, for the sake of the final couplet, which has 
 a far more modern kind of ample and intelligible 
 beauty : 
 
 O glorious sun, imagine me the west ! 
 
 Shine in my arms, and set thou in my breast ! 
 
 Next comes that pretty song ' Radagon in 
 Dianam ', which is to be praised not as a whole, but 
 for some stanzas in which the cypresses keep 
 a golden sun away from a ' valley gaudy green ', 
 and from nymphs in white. There never was any 
 scene at once warmer and more fresh. The fountain 
 is cool in a shade that the sun never shot an arrow 
 through, but the sense of outer sunshine is intense 
 and clear, and the dark trees seem to flame blackly, 
 as they do on such a sky. ' Outer darkness', by the 
 way, is a familiar phrase, but ' outer sunshine ' is 
 a presence hardly removed in the southern summer. 
 
 This vivid impression from Greene's poem is 
 caused by the most careless of verses. As a lyrist,
 
 i6 Strictly an Elizabethan Lyrist 
 
 he never leant hard upon anything; he has the 
 lightest foot, and seems rather to whistle than to 
 sing his tunes upon the way. So lightly is the verse 
 giwn to the wind that you are apt to read it as 
 i ari I ly, and so to lose something. This Song of 
 the Fountain, for instance, should be read with 
 more leisure than at a glance it seems to merit. 
 
 Greene is dull to any reader who does not take 
 the pains to cancel all the conventions of the times 
 that followed his Elizabethan day. The pure 
 fountains, the nymphs, and the other valleys, gaudy 
 green, must be simply forgotten ; and the task is 
 not difficult. Greene has all the good luck by his 
 Elizabethanism — inalienable good luck, which was 
 neither to be repeated by others, nor to be taken 
 from his own head upon whom it alighted first. We, 
 who have been wearied by succeeding nymphs, need 
 not be wearied by those nymphs that were his — 
 and this not because his were best, but because his 
 were first. 
 
 See now how he made the mere Cupid childish, 
 wild, and dear : 
 
 Cupid abroad was lated in the night, 
 
 His wings were wet with ranging in the rain. 
 
 But it is hardly possible not to find him somewhat 
 dull, especially when he is not at his best, because 
 he has so little to say. There never was a poet who 
 said less. These poems of his, after all, were, in his 
 own estimation, not important enough to be written 
 for their own sake ; they were but snatches of songs
 
 Strictly an Elizabethan Lyrist 17 
 
 in his prose writings — novels and what not ; and 
 poems so set flying at any other time and in any 
 other English could not have kept their motion and 
 their spirit so long. They never cost him a thought ; 
 and the only sign of attention is in the versification. 
 This is by no means always good, but in ' Radagon 
 in Dianam ' it is very good indeed ; the foot is 
 elastic and moves with a rebound. 
 
 But as to thoughts, he is at small expense. Take 
 his charming description of ' A Shepherd and His 
 Wife '. As though in the idleness of an empty 
 mind, he lets his eyes note what is really hardly 
 matter for verse— the way, for example, in which 
 the flaps of the shepherd's coat were turned over. 
 It is grotesque to produce a rhyme for such a detail 
 as that. But in the same poem are some lively 
 verses about the wife which seem not only to set her 
 up for admiration and delight, but to dance about 
 her in a round when that is done. 
 
 Nor is there more in ' The Shepherd Wife's Song ', 
 in which the happiest shepherdess in Thessaly com- 
 pares her love and state with those of queens, and 
 makes her boast sweetly and with a pretty and apt 
 refrain. But ' Fair Samela ' — oftener quoted — has 
 a weakness and listlessness that spoil its grace ; 
 and, after this, what is left ? Robert Greene was 
 a small poet among the minor poets ; but his hour 
 struck in the cool of the morning, and, whatever 
 kind of simplicity was in his mind, the authentic 
 simplicity was in his English. 
 
 B
 
 'A MODERN POETESS' 
 
 The cruel places of history arc for ever emptied 
 of their suffering tenants, and it is only to our in- 
 appeasable sympathies that the lifelong prisoners 
 seem to be recaptured, sent back to their intolerable 
 hours and places, long after they have once for all, 
 unchallenged, passed the guard. Every martyrdom 
 of the past has ceased to be ; it concerns no one how 
 sharp, how insupportable it was in its day. There 
 is no living pain now in all the universe to continue 
 it, to answer it, to rehearse it, or perhaps to regret 
 it. And if we complain that the past is not to be 
 revoked or undone, we might rather confess the 
 complete consolation of the passing of time, the 
 undoing, the effacement, and the more than death. 
 It is only by moments that we apprehend what it is 
 to be past, or that we perceive how clean is natural 
 oblivion ; the uneasy human retrospection stirs 
 nothing but itself, and wounds the now living heart 
 with a present pity for that which is not. Nothing 
 now on earth remembers. 
 
 The popular phrase is expressive : ' I know the 
 thing is over and done ; but it afflicts me to think 
 of it.' So we acknowledge that there is no trouble 
 but in the present, and that though our minds seem 
 to travel into the past, in truth they do not budge ; 
 and we, prisoners of our own moment, are fluttered
 
 ' A Modern Poetess ' 19 
 
 with the present sympathy, and not with the 
 vanished sorrow, for this is not. 
 
 By far the greater number of human sufferings 
 have been forgotten by man as purely and freshly 
 as by nature. Of a few, that fictitious memory 
 which is history and tradition renews the report 
 with so much attention as to preserve something 
 like the dramatic unity of time. To read of them 
 and to think of them is nearly as long as it was to 
 endure them. But of others again we have the 
 brief record that shows long hollow spaces of time, 
 perfectly dark and indescribed. Among these is 
 the bitter life and death of Arabella Stuart, told by 
 our popular historians in a short paragraph that 
 ends with her death of a ' broken heart ' — the 
 extravagant phrase interrupting the historical style 
 and making the page conspicuous to childish 
 learners. 
 
 Evelyn has her in his list of learned women, 
 although she is not in the catalogue of those whom 
 he sacrificed at one blow to the glory of the Duchess 
 of Newcastle. ' Hilpylas, the mother-in-law of the 
 young Plinie, Cornelia so neere the greate Scipio,' 
 and Lucretia Marinella, who is not mentioned as 
 any one's mother-in-law, but as the author of a 
 work DelV excellenzia delle Donne, con difetti e 
 mancamenti degli Huomini — with the inferiority of 
 these and such as these does he flatter the sur- 
 passing Duchess. The sorrows of Arabella Stuart 
 would have made her name too sad a sacrifice for 
 
 b 2
 
 20 ' A Modern Poetess ' 
 
 such a train. The other ladies are presented gaily 
 and as it were in garlands : ' They possesse but 
 that divided which your Grace rctaines in one.' 
 
 Nevertheless, Arabella was, even for an age when 
 women of station were well taught, notable for 
 her education. Her Latin letters are still there to 
 attest it. She was named a ' modern poetess ' by 
 Mr. Philips, who was Milton's nephew. These 
 secondary, second-hand, relative distinctions are in 
 touching disproportion with her original, immediate, 
 and authentic sufferings. The delicately sharp 
 edging that a more or less literary training gives 
 to the natural human mind, making it aware, had 
 been given to hers ; and she was so prepared by 
 delicate erudition that the loss of all she loved was 
 complete to her, the suspense of imprisonment 
 inconsolable, and its idleness more than mortal. 
 She lost better than her life, for the prison ruined 
 her reason before it released her body, twice rifled 
 and destitute, and dismissed it to Westminster 
 Abbey and the grave. 
 
 It is in her letters to her husband, and only in 
 these, that Arabella Stuart is perceptible as she 
 lived. The letters of entreaty to King James are 
 the letters of those abject times. They declare her 
 to be in despair, not because of the separation from 
 her husband and only friend, and not because of 
 her solitude in perpetual prison, but on account of 
 the King's disfavour, of her exile from his presence, 
 and by reason of the remorse and contrition of one
 
 ' A Modern Poetess ' 21 
 
 who had disobeyed him, even unwittingly, liy 
 these forms of ignominy did men and women rule, 
 not their phrases only, but, apparently, their very 
 thoughts. Such declarations were much more than 
 a courtesy due to kings or the decorum of a style in 
 letter-writing. Hearts beat hard to that most 
 grotesque tune ; those were real self-reproaches ; 
 they banished real sleep, human sleep, afflicted real 
 consciences, set the tears of men running, and 
 squandered and scattered to waste that human 
 treasure, humility. 
 
 Lady Arabella's remorse, as she took leave to 
 remind the King, was poignant for her offence in 
 having bestowed herself in marriage upon the 
 King's permission. He seems to have either for- 
 gotten or silently rescinded his consent, and for 
 this she overwhelmed herself in professions of regret 
 and promises of obedience. She sent to the Queen 
 some little pieces of needlework, the sewing of which, 
 she said, had beguiled the time ' for her whose 
 serious mind must invent some relaxation '. 
 'Womanish toys', she called them, conscious of her 
 education, and she thanked the gentleman who was 
 her gaoler for consenting to present them. Her way 
 of submission was even approved by the tyrant. 
 One of her letters to the King, said Montford, 
 ' was penned by her in the best terms, as she can 
 do right well. It was often read without offence ; 
 nay, it was even commended by his Highness, with 
 the applause of Prince and Council.' The best
 
 22 ' A Modem Poetess ' 
 
 terms are of course the most reverent. The clergy 
 e ■xhorted her with one voice. The stricter keeping, 
 to which she so dreaded to be consigned as to fall ill 
 of fear, was that of the Bishop of Durham. 
 
 She had the heart to deny her commended letters 
 so far as to practise some secret disobedience, heap- 
 ing up self-reproach for the vigils of her solitude. 
 The letters to her husband, from whom she had 
 been parted after but a few months of marriage, 
 were contraband. Even in these, her allusions to 
 the King were most dutiful, but her husband was 
 her theme. ' Rachel wept,' she wrote, ' and would 
 not be comforted, because her children were no 
 more. And that, indeed, is the remedyless sorrow, 
 and none else ! And, therefore, God bless us from 
 that, and I will hope well for the rest, though I see 
 no apparent hope.' Her husband was ill, as she 
 heard from others. ' Sir,' she wrote, ' I am exceed- 
 ing sorry to hear that you have not been well. I am 
 not satisfied with the reason Smith gives for it ; 
 but, if it be a cold, I will impute it to some sym- 
 pathy betwixt us, having myself gotten a swollen 
 cheek at the same time with a cold. For God's 
 sake, let not your grief of mind work upon your 
 body. You may see by me what inconvenience it 
 will bring one to ; and no fortune, I assure you, 
 daunts me so much as that weakness of body I find 
 in myself; for "si nous vivons l'age d'un veau ", 
 as Marot says, we may, by God's grace, be happier 
 than we look for, in being suliercd to enjoy ourself
 
 ' A Modem Poetess ' 23 
 
 with his Majesty's favour. But if we be not able 
 to live it, I, for my part, shall think myself a pattern 
 of misfortune, in enjoying so great a blessing as you 
 so little while.' 
 
 Again, she reminded him that he had not written 
 to her ' this good while '. ' You see when I am 
 troubled, I trouble you with tedious kindness, for 
 so I think you will account so long a letter. But, 
 sweet Sir, I speak not this to trouble you with 
 writing but when you please. Be well, and I shall 
 account myself happy in being your faithful and 
 loving wife.' 
 
 As soon as these letters were discovered the 
 writing was stopped. Enough was written, and 
 enough even remains, to show the spirit, generous, 
 worthy of liberty, capable of gaiety, forced to grief, 
 of this unfortunate. A graver revolt against her 
 tyrants was her escape to join her husband in flight 
 from the Tower. Ill fortune set all the times, tides, 
 and winds wrong on that unhappy adventure. She 
 would not save herself without him. She was 
 brought back, and from the new imprisonment 
 there was no escape. The indignant King satisfied 
 justice by refusing another little offering of her 
 needlework. In her appeal to the Queen she had 
 entreated that the gloves she had made might be 
 accepted ' in remembrance of the poor prisoner that 
 wrought them, in hopes her royal hands will vouch- 
 safe to wear them, which, till I have the honour to 
 kiss, I shall live in a great deal of sorrow'.
 
 24 ' A Modern Poetess ' 
 
 ' In all humility, the most wretched and un- 
 fortunate creature that ever lived prostrates itselfe 
 at the feet of the most merciful King that ever was.' 
 These are among the last 'best terms' that Arabella 
 Stuart penned. 
 
 Her King and Queen and country sent her 
 civilization into solitude, gagged her classics, dis- 
 proved her poetry, and thrust her ' expanded mind ' 
 into the inner darkness.
 
 TO ITALY WITH EVELYN 
 
 Is any one so courageous as to wish for a glimpse 
 of the city and the landscape of the future, two 
 centuries and a half hence ? Even if so, he can 
 hardly desire it so warmly as the fainter-hearted 
 desires the sight of the past. At any rate, if there 
 be any scene that we would willingly be admitted 
 to see as it is to be, that scene is not in Italy. 
 
 Thither would we willingly journey not later than 
 in the day of John Evelyn, when he travelled in his 
 youthful dignity, provided with letters, and spent 
 some seasons in Rome, and studied for a year at the 
 University of Padua. Every one knows his journal 
 of the English Church under the Commonwealth, 
 of the Plague, of the Fire, of the Court of Charles II. 
 But not the least charming part of one of the most 
 readable of books — a book written in an English 
 prose that had not yet undergone much manipula- 
 tion, but was still a little rigid, but rigid with 
 vitality — is somewhat neglected ; it is the part 
 that records this progress through France to the 
 Coast, and thence into Italy as far as Naples, and 
 home by Venice, the Lakes, the Simplon Pass, and 
 Switzerland. The happy man ! When he drew 
 near, after peril of shipwreck, to the port of Genoa, 
 he ' perfectly smelt the joyes of Italy '. This was 
 off the noble village of Sanpierdarena, where now
 
 26 To Italy with Evelyn 
 
 you may smell the odour of factories — soap-boiling 
 and other things — for it has lately come to be stifled 
 with thick smoke, and the mountain gardens are 
 dying with their blackened arbours. Only of late 
 have those ancient, coloured terraces, coloured as 
 a few masterly landscapes are painted, so that 
 a little of the canvas, or a little of the view, might 
 be set in a ring and worn as a jewel — only of late 
 have the gardens, once in rich and fortunate neglect, 
 ceased to breathe their ancient breath. 
 
 ' We recovered the shore, which we now kept in 
 view within half a league, in sight of those pleasant 
 villas, and within scent of those fragrant orchards 
 which are on this coast, full of princely retirements 
 for the sumptuousnesse of their buildings and 
 noblesse of the plantations, from whence, the wind 
 blowing as it did, might perfectly be smelt the joyes 
 of Italy, in the perfumes of orange, citron, and 
 jasmine flowers for divers leagues seaward.' And 
 Evelyn was so much struck by the aura of this coast 
 as to record it again in the dedication of his ' Fumi- 
 fugium ' to Charles II. What has befallen Sanpier- 
 darena — that one place precisely, of all others — 
 in the years just past makes the whole incident of 
 this welcoming message from the cultivated lands, 
 and of the ensuing treatise and its title, sound some- 
 what cruel in irony. 
 
 John Evelyn tried in vain to stay the approach- 
 ing smoke, as he tried also — by an application to 
 the same monarch — to avert the course of fashion
 
 To Italy with Evelyn 27 
 
 in the then important dress of men. The East he 
 thought better worth following than France, and 
 he proposed a whole revision of the Western mode, 
 and presented the King with a plan whereby the 
 trivial fashions of ' the monsieurs ' were to be 
 exchanged for an Oriental ' noblesse '. Charles 
 accepted the pamphlet, and was soon after seen to 
 wear a Persian robe ; but he rather shabbily left 
 Evelyn to conjecture, in silence, that it was his 
 advice that had been taken. In the end, the King 
 slid back, and ' the monsieurs ' had it. If John 
 Evelyn had had that glimpse into the future which 
 few of us desire to-day, how could he have endured 
 those French inventions to which the East has now 
 been partly converted, and the fumes of that ash- 
 strewn piece of coast ? ' But a soap-factory ! ' 
 cries the English reader, seeing all kinds of happy 
 national sarcasm in the industry that, among others, 
 has brought about this special local change. It 
 happens, however, pat to this matter of soap, that 
 Evelyn makes a note to the effect that he bought, 
 in one of the towns of North Italy, certain ' wash- 
 balls ' which seemed to be new to him ; he speaks 
 of them as a useful invention. Before the factory 
 had taken the place of the fragrant orchards the 
 people of that coast had the constant custom of 
 washing all their clothes. It is much to be feared 
 that the smoke of the soap- factory has already put 
 an end to that habit by making it too difficult, or 
 impossible.
 
 28 To Italy with Evelyn 
 
 Sonic consolation is to be found in this — that if 
 a mile of that incomparable coast is spoilt, there 
 remain scores of miles all untouched, differing only 
 in the lesser majesty of the houses and gardens with 
 their great sea-walls. The ' sumptuousnesse ' ad- 
 mired by Evelyn will never be restored ; but of the 
 mere walls of those rougher houses too, in their 
 place in the landscape, pieces might be set as jewels. 
 It was always in praise of gardens that Evelyn 
 wrote. Otherwise the general modern complaint 
 as to the insensibility of the older writers to the 
 daily splendours of nature is hardly unjust in his 
 case. He, without noting, saw the change of skies 
 that sets alight the world when you have crossed the 
 Alps ; and of the further illumination of a southern 
 spring he says nothing ; but he makes mention of 
 the 'extraordinary long ' tail of ahorse, which he saw 
 in a collection of curiosities, nor do two horns of as 
 many unicorns go unrecorded, for he had a grave 
 and simple admiration of such things as petri- 
 factions, flies in amber, and all minor marvels. Nor 
 does he cease to be a learned and most responsible 
 man, in whose adult but innocent style we are to 
 see nothing contrary to the dignities of State and 
 office. The false air of childishness which this kind 
 of English gives to the style of Pepys always makes 
 his public functions and honours seem to us incon- 
 gruous. In Evelyn's Diary, by the way, we meet 
 Mr. Pepys, about some Admiralty business, with 
 so much solemnity that we hardly know him again.
 
 To Italy with Evelyn 29 
 
 It is Italy that seems (by her people) to have an 
 air of childishness in our eyes to-day. I have to 
 confess that when I hear an Italian say something 
 to the purpose I always cry inwardly ' How intelli- 
 gent ! ' But in those days England took frankly 
 a lower place. It could not be otherwise, seeing that 
 the late Renaissance as it was then in Rome had 
 imposed law and taste upon the whole of Europe. 
 Evelyn had nothing whatever to be proud of at home, 
 inasmuch as he was ashamed of York Minster, 
 Lincoln, Durham, and the rest ; inasmuch, too, as 
 Shakespeare's name occurs not once in his book. 
 He never doubts that modern art had reached its 
 culmination in St. Peter's and the Lateran, in Guido 
 Reni and Domenichino. 
 
 He found all those splendours new, and it is no 
 wonder if he was convinced that all this art in course 
 of progress, as it was visibly, must be better integ- 
 rally than what had gone before. He took no notice 
 of the earlier masters of any of the schools, but 
 admired precisely as Horace Walpole admired, and 
 on the same scale and according to the same order. 
 He was diligent in the galleries, but the student of 
 to-day is dismayed to see no Botticelli up or down 
 the page, and to find the polite English traveller in 
 rapture before the blatant Bernini. 
 
 Englishmen, in a word, paid Italy the great com- 
 pliment of taking her at the highest estimation as 
 she was at the moment. There was no painful 
 comparison with any period of the past, for we have
 
 30 To Italy with Evelyn 
 
 evidence in his works that Bernini was not afraid of 
 antiquity itself. In arts, in letters, in arms, in 
 science especially, Italy was foremost in present 
 action — there was her splendour, as we may find it 
 hard to realize. Evelyn sent home preparations 
 from her schools of anatomy to the Royal Society, 
 to which such things were new. 
 
 And as to the gardens, happy was this traveller, 
 who was soon after to plan the hedges and alleys of 
 Wotton and of Sayes Court, in such a school of 
 gardens. He had, in England, to contend with the 
 perpetual inequalities which have hardly been 
 sufficiently recognized as distinctive of our plains. 
 In Italy he found the plains to be flat with that 
 peculiar sub-alpine flatness, and the roads straight. 
 Most beautiful with the mountains for a distance — 
 but he hardly had eyes for the mountains. It is 
 rather difficult to forgive him for calling the rocks 
 and bays of the coast ' horrid gaps ' and ' dreadful 
 mountains' ; but ' Oh, the sweet Paradise ! ' he 
 cries among the fountains and the vines. 
 
 His was a clear spirit. Wherever he journeyed 
 he went upright ; and if we desire to travel with 
 him into Italy, it is not only for the sake of his Italy 
 but for the sake of himself. Something we would 
 have from him in exchange for our better informa- 
 tion on the ' Gotiq ordonance '.
 
 WATERFALLS 
 
 ' We then went out to see a cascade. I trudged 
 unwillingly, and was not sorry to find it dry.' 
 Dr. Johnson was not often pleased, it seems, upon 
 this tour in Wales in the company of ' my mistress ' 
 and her family, and the arid waterfall was no doubt 
 a welcome incident, for the scenery had been tedious 
 to his spirit. He made light of the mountains, and 
 did not hesitate to propose a strange image to the 
 fancy of his companions when he derided a river 
 unlucky enough to come into the prospect : ' Why, 
 sir, I could clear any part of it by a leap.' He rated 
 very low the old house of Mrs. Thrale's family, 
 though as a house it amused him more than any 
 view. ' The addition of another storey would make 
 an useful house, but it cannot be great.' The old 
 parish clerk who, seeing Mrs. Thrale again, 'foolishly 
 said that he was now willing to die,' is no doubt 
 justly rebuked ; but so seems to be Mrs. Thrale 
 herself : ' He had only a crown given him by my 
 mistress.' Then there was that dispute on the 
 Chester walls ; and, first and last, Dr. Johnson was 
 not found to be best of companions by the ' pretty 
 woman ' witty enough to ' add something to the 
 conversation ', with whom he himself would have 
 been all content. 
 
 There is reason to think that scenery in those
 
 32 Waterfalls 
 
 days was rather unfairly and dully insisted upon as 
 a matter of taste. ' Dispositions of wood and water ' 
 were the subjects of a kind of expert study, and it 
 is easy to understand what a bore a landscape 
 might become under the eye of a judge. Miss 
 Austen shows a distinct tendency to bring water, 
 rising ground, and well- wooded slopes under review. 
 If a modern mansion has been erected, with ignor- 
 ance, in too low a situation, she has an instant eye 
 for the barbarism. The shrubberies, the curving 
 carriage drives, the conifers, the farm-buildings, if 
 any, duly planted out, come under the rapid 
 approval of an elegant mind, and so does the far 
 prospect no less. The distance is declared to be in 
 harmony with the demands of a lover of nature ; 
 and as you read you can hardly think of the scenery 
 as thrilled with summer wind, or believe that its 
 miles would mark human feet with dust, or would 
 be measured by the wavering rods of human weari- 
 ness, or subject to any incidents except those of 
 a careful engraving. There is some charm in the 
 false-classical landscape of that time, merely looked 
 back upon ; but it would be something less than 
 interesting to be presently in the company of people 
 who talked much of the dispositions of wood and 
 water. There is a certain way of looking at a view 
 that affects one almost with dismay to hear of. 
 When a professor of scenery asks you to enjoy what 
 he always calls a peep, with several kinds of fir-trees 
 coyly betraying the way to it, there is little delight
 
 Waterfalls 33 
 
 there ; nor arc cottages so pleasant when they, too, 
 arc said to peep ; but this is a later and even a duller 
 fancy. Landscape a hundred years ago had more 
 dignity, though no more ' spirit in the woods '. 
 
 If the dispositions of wood and water allowed of 
 a waterfall, it is impossible to imagine a more wel- 
 come addition at that day to scenery constructed, 
 like Mr. Pecksniff's younger daughter, upon good 
 principles. The cascade had not yet been made 
 quite a common convention, for the ' picturesque ' 
 had not then come and gone, making dull in its 
 passage, at least in art and in letters, the sallies of 
 nature. To find a waterfall, in the right place, was 
 in those days an elegant and natural joy ; and it 
 must have been no small disappointment to see 
 Dr. Johnson trudging unwillingly. But no doubt 
 there had been too much said. 
 
 Taste, always so nearly in peril of derogation, 
 and, in fact, so quickly, according to all experience, 
 dimmed by habit, has done wrong, by its weak 
 preferences, to all the flowers of scenery — not to the 
 actual flowers of vegetation only, though these have 
 long been turned to the basest uses of all decora- 
 tion — but to the other outbreaks of the movement 
 and vitality of earth. The white tops of mountains 
 and the climax of storms, forests in their utmost 
 leaf, waves at the crest, the clouds of sunset newly 
 on fire, waters in haste — what a gathering of 
 blossoms is this from the summits of the world, 
 whether on heights or on plains ! Light and sound 
 
 c
 
 34 Waterfalls 
 
 seem to be set free by the mere resounding thought 
 of so much fruition. But, for their all-intelligible 
 beauty, these crowns of things were long tossed 
 together for the use of any one who so much as 
 knew their names, and not the less cheaply because 
 the language of description grew to be more subtle, 
 more expert, and more poetic. Soon that expert 
 quality also became, as it were, the waste and 
 refuse of literature. 
 
 Waterfalls, then, have been too much in use. 
 Not only by the travelling party of the Thrales have 
 they been proposed too pressingly to admiration. 
 They cannot be restored at second hand to their 
 dignity. A very great man might restore them to 
 his readcre by a word, but no one of less authority 
 than his need begin to take the trouble to look for 
 it. The right course is to see them where they are, 
 and to let the literature of the matter rest. Any 
 phrase written here in praise of waterfalls — if such 
 should escape — is not intended to do more than 
 point the way whither the traveller may trudge if 
 he will. Norway and the Pyrenees keep for us the 
 surprise of perpetually new waters drawing to the 
 ancient fall. 
 
 The Alps, even, have many a slender stream, per- 
 haps bearing no name, and certainly known by no 
 names out of sight of their nearest peaks, that are 
 remembered in their solitude, or at least recognized 
 at each return of the traveller, where they drop, 
 hushed by their distance as much as by the noisy
 
 Waterfalls 35 
 
 train. There is one, for instance, seen for but 
 a moment, that has so long a fall as to grow weak 
 and to swing in all the light winds. The strong stem 
 of the cascade springs from the bed of its upland 
 stream ; and as from a strong stem a sapling 
 wavers upwards, entangled at last in all breezes, so 
 the dropping brook wavers downwards to its last 
 and lighter motion. 
 
 Waterfalls that arc turned to torrents have not 
 been so much the subject of the landscape of con- 
 vention. Their wildness did not so take the general 
 fancy when conventions were made ; but they are 
 the vitality of the mountains. Theirs is an expres- 
 sion of movement so great that all the Alpine 
 region seems to manifest its life only by these noisy 
 valleys. All communications, all signals and 
 messages of the range, hasten in and out by these 
 brilliant cataracts, one in the depth of every ravine. 
 
 They are not only the traffic and the mission of 
 their mountains, the coursing of that cold blood and 
 the pulse of the rock, but they carry the mountain 
 spirit far out. There is no country under moun- 
 tains but has its quietness awakened by wilder 
 rivers than other lands are watered by. When the 
 range is out of sight, the torrents are still hasty, 
 cataract below cataract, shallow and clear, quick 
 from the impulse of waterfalls. No loitering rivers 
 in earthy beds keep level banks in those plains that 
 have their horizon lifted by the line of great moun- 
 tains ; no silent rivers. 
 
 c 2
 
 36 Waterfalls 
 
 If the torrent runs dry, there is no one to be vexed 
 by the silence. Dr. Johnson would not, perhaps, 
 be asked to trudge for the sake of the rough charms 
 of a mere torrent ; but even if the disposition of 
 wood and water comprised a torrent, he would have 
 no revenge for his literary weariness in seeing his 
 guide abashed. For a dry torrent is a most beauti- 
 ful wreck, the ruin of a splendid progress and pro- 
 cession, of which the leader, when he went by, did 
 not pass unknown. Such arc the wide watercourses 
 of the valleys in the Canton de Vaud, the colour of 
 their innumerable stones a bright daylight grey, 
 and the threads ol water of their time of drought 
 rippling just audibly by night. 
 
 Not all waterfalls make the conspicuous show of 
 the cascades that take their leap from the rocks. 
 In early autumn there is nothing fresher or sweeter 
 than the minute, perpetual waterfall that hides in 
 moss and undergrowth, and slips everywhere from 
 the Alps. The air is nowhere silent, and hardly 
 a blade of grass is unstirred by the delicate thrill of 
 water. Without paths it drops minutely and in- 
 visibly into the lakes, the gentlest of all the signs of 
 the barren and lofty snow.
 
 A TOMB IN BAYSWATER 
 
 Not many Londoners, it seems, know where 
 amongst them Sterne was buried ; but his tomb 
 stands where it did, duly tended, so that the super- 
 scription is clean and clear, within perpetual sound 
 of the voices, of the feet, of the hootings, and 
 of the wheels on the long westward road that 
 starts for Oxford from Tyburn Gate. Perhaps the 
 story told by the surgeon who thought he recog- 
 nized a dead man anonymous upon a dissecting 
 table, at the time of Sterne's death in Bond-street, 
 has discouraged the national and the local interest 
 in an accessible London grave of the great. Yet it 
 matters little whether the dust beneath this grey, 
 Georgian, braggart, vain, heavy, and ungenerous 
 headstone be now mingled with the dust that was 
 the body of Sterne ; or at least it is a question that 
 touches no more than the fancy. 
 
 The lapse of time might be important in our 
 thoughts on Sterne's tomb if we measured by the 
 long years of childhood ; but we do not, because 
 it is the short mature years that are historical. 
 Added together the adult two centuries since 
 Sterne was born are brief enough. Never did 
 garden, court, or house, remembered with the 
 large remembrance of ancient and spacious infancy, 
 so shrink before the eye of the revisiting old man 
 as the rod of ten years dwindles in his grasp.
 
 38 A Tomb in Bayswater 
 
 Time is all depreciated, disproved. No device, 
 such as Thoreau's for reducing the past to its real 
 brevity, is necessary. He had spoken to one old 
 woman and had wondered at the date whereto 
 her birth referred him, but bethought himself 
 how few of such lives as hers outstride all history 
 and the very life of the race. But to join long 
 life to long life is to pass in fancy by so many 
 consecutive childhoods, for then the time will 
 seem not short but immeasurably long. The 
 childish years prolong time ; the adult years, a 
 man's middle years, the short years of life, make 
 Time's changes, doing Time's work. 
 
 A mere score of such decades take us back 
 through Wordsworth and Keats, the great English 
 painters, the French Revolution, almost to the day 
 when Sterne was born. What a trifle ! 
 
 A score of our little adult decades have passed 
 since the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, planned 
 by Pope, Arbuthnot, and Swift, were a fit and actual 
 satire upon science ; since a medical pedant — 
 learned, not a simpleton — was to be rallied for 
 relying upon dreams and certain prescriptions of 
 Galen, for example. (And of that best of satires 
 since Cervantes, this Sterne, by the way, was the 
 copyist.) It is the effect of the twenty poor decades 
 that so fills and stuffs the narrow range of time. 
 To unpack these years is somewhat like the unload- 
 ing of a ripe bulrush, or of some other lately-closed 
 house of seeds in autumn, whereof the wings were
 
 A Tomb in Bayswater 39 
 
 bound until they opened with a spring, never to 
 close again ; and the air is filled with the released 
 burden of the slender rod. 
 
 Not because of the flight of time, then, is this 
 solitude of brilliant sky, broad grass, and trees 
 tossed by the summer wind, a place of interest ; 
 nor for the love of Sterne, who ought not to be too 
 easily forgiven. Henry Morley gave us a Tristram 
 Shandy purged (or a peu pres), but the stealthy 
 offence is so constant in Sterne's intention that 
 something like his own ignoble agility might be 
 necessary for one who would at every point evade 
 it. Morley suppressed one page in ten or so (apt 
 action, as he avers, so to take tithes from the clergy), 
 and he seems to have done the work as well as an 
 honest man ought to hope to be able to do it. Of 
 that no honest man can be precisely apprised — it 
 would need a Sterne. All I mean to say is that for 
 those who intend to read Tristram Shandy, or to 
 read it again, Henry Morley's (in the Universal 
 Library Scries) is an edition to be welcomed ; to 
 lose one page in ten is to lose nothing essential to 
 the masterpiece. 
 
 What moves curiosity here is the question why 
 this bullying headstone should have been erected 
 at the will of two anonymous ' Brother Masons ', 
 inconsequently so called in their own inscription, 
 inasmuch as Sterne was not of their craft. Here 
 are the couplets, turned with the metrical ability of 
 that day, and making slovenly thinking to move
 
 40 A Tomb in Bayswater 
 
 with precision. After announcing that in that place 
 1 lyes the body of the Reverend Laurence Sterne, 
 A.M.' — ' Ah ! molliter ossa quiescant ! ' — the lines 
 run thus : 
 
 If a sound head, warm heart, and breast humane, 
 Unsully'd worth, and soul without a stain ; 
 If mental powers could ever justly claim 
 The well-won tribute of immortal fame ; 
 Sterne was the man who with gigantic stride 
 Mow'd down luxuriant follies far and wide. 
 Yet what though keenest knowledge of mankind, 
 Unseal'd to him the springs that move the mind ; 
 What did it boot him ? Ridicul'd, abus'd, 
 By fools insulted and by prudes accus'd. 
 In his, mild reader, view thy future fate : 
 Like him, despise what 'twere a sin to hate. 
 
 The confusion of images and of purposes in this 
 composition needs no exposing. Its coherence is 
 nevertheless invested with that virtue of propriety 
 which the age of the couplet possessed, to the extra- 
 ordinary gain of all its secondary literature, and of 
 the less than secondary. Dignity is too lofty a name 
 for a quality so inessential ; but it must be owned 
 that two Brother Masons, owners of reasoning 
 powers of the same order, and so angry as these two 
 seem to have been, would to-day, or in any other 
 day than that, have turned their verse with less 
 self-possession and balance. Grim and weak, with 
 a single flourish that never delighted any human 
 eye, classical and paltry at once, is the character- 
 istic funereal stone that bears the lines.
 
 A Tomb in Bayswatcr 41 
 
 Modern philanthropy — perhaps that of the mild 
 reader himself so inconsequently threatened in the 
 verse — has changed the old burial-ground into 
 a place of recreation absolutely unnecessary in 
 a road that has Hyde Park on the other side of its 
 railings. The mild reader has levelled the grass and 
 cleared all the tombstones — Sterne's and one or 
 two more excepted — from the wide square, ranging 
 them against the four walls, two deep. The names 
 will be but a little the later forgotten. One poor 
 little name, because of the primness of the title, 
 remains in the mind — that of ' Miss Susannah 
 Headlam, who departed this life March the 6th, 
 18 19, aged three years '. 
 
 No one comes to the superfluous pleasure-ground. 
 Under the beautiful plane-trees flocks of sparrows 
 alight with the leaves of a crisp, dry London autumn 
 having a sun of summer, and the cats look at them, 
 knowing there is no cover to spring from. Cover or 
 no cover, on the impulse, a happy dog would hunt 
 these flocks at random ; the cat contains the 
 passion of his wish as he strolls. He makes no 
 crouch or spring, except, now and then, upon some 
 minute moth which he afterwards eats with much 
 ado and working of the jaws. 
 
 At the entrance stands the Chapel of Rest with 
 the frescoes offered by Shields to the meditation of 
 whomsoever will pause to take advantage of the 
 quiet hour ; and hither, in fact, come a very few 
 Londoners, out of the noise.
 
 A CORRUPT FOLLOWING 
 
 During the whole nineteenth century our 
 language underwent a certain derogation, notorious, 
 different in kind from the corruptions of all other 
 ages, and as familiar as brick and slate, gas, and the 
 architecture of stations — and apparently of yester- 
 day, and to-day, and of a morrow seen in rather dull 
 and discouraging prospect. But the truth is that this 
 common speech is due to the enormous influence 
 of a great author who was born in 1737, was for 
 forty-seven years the contemporary of Dr. Johnson, 
 and died well within the eighteenth century. 
 
 Whose, for instance, is the use of ' I expect ' 
 for a conjecture referring to the past ? It is 
 Gibbon's : ' I should expect that the eunuchs 
 were not expelled from the palace.' What is the 
 ' and which ', ' and who ' of the slovenly ? and 
 what the ' whose ' applied to inanimate things by 
 authors too fine and too modern to write ' where- 
 of ' ? Gear of Gibbon's style, both : ' Below the 
 citadel stood a palace of gold, decorated with 
 precious stones, and whose value might be 
 esteemed,' &c. ; and ' A Menapian of the meanest 
 origin, but who had long signalized his skill as 
 a pilot '. There is, it is true, the inanimate 
 ' whose ' of a more illustrious and older author, 
 but that claims the excuse of metre.
 
 A Corrupt Following 43 
 
 Whence have we that peculiarly harsh vul- 
 garism, ' so much per month ', instead of ' so much 
 a month ', or ' per mensem ' ? From Gibbon. 
 * And coal will be by the sack or per the scuttle,' 
 said a seaside landlady, in some one's observant ear. 
 In her innocen e she would not have said it but for 
 Gibbon. And whose is the confusion of speech that 
 cannot give the word 'same ' its proper completion, 
 but saddles it with a relative pronoun ? Gibbon's : 
 ' The Western countries were civilized by the 
 same hands which subdued them.' ' The hands 
 which subdued them ' would be correct, and 
 certainly more majestic. 
 
 Gibbon set the example of this common lax 
 grammar : ' Instead of receiving with manly 
 resolution the inevitable stroke, his unavailing 
 cries and entreaties disgraced the last moments 
 of his life ' ; and ' The election of Carus was 
 decided without expecting the approval of the 
 Senate ' ; and ' A peasant and a soldier, his 
 nerves yielded not easily to the impressions of 
 sympathy '. And there is nothing that (Gibbon 
 always says 'which') illiterate politeness is so fond 
 of as this unconstructed and decorated phrase. 
 Gibbon's literature was scholarly, and these errors 
 of his alter little or nothing of the honour due to 
 his eminent elegance of style. But it was these 
 laxities that took the public taste mightily, and it 
 was the ' corrupt following ' of this apostle that 
 set the fashion of an animated strut of style —
 
 44 A Corrupt Following 
 
 a strut that was animated in its day .and soon 
 grew inanimate, as the original authentic Gibbon 
 never does. His own narrative never fails to reply 
 to a perpetual stimulation. 
 
 But to deal with the rest of the grammatical 
 ill-example, left to unlucky generations from the 
 very middle of the century of propriety, and made 
 so much our own. It is very modern to have 
 ' either ' or ' neither ' followed by more than two 
 things, and it is pure Gibbon ; all the more con- 
 spicuous as Gibbon dearly loves the sound of 
 three : ' The policy of the senate, the active 
 emulation of the consuls, and the martial en- 
 thusiasm of the people ' ; ' The undertaking 
 became more difficult, the event more doubtful, 
 and the possession more precarious.' But the 
 three go ill with ' either ' : ' either food, plunder, 
 or glory ; ' ' either salt, or oil, or wood '. ' The 
 generals were either respected by their troops, or 
 admired for valour, or beloved for frankness and 
 generosity.' 
 
 Finally, for a very little and silly blunder, what 
 is more modern and current and popular than 
 this : ' Magnus, with four thousand of his supposed 
 accomplices, were put to death ' ? And even this 
 is Gibbon. 
 
 To have done with mere grammar, there is 
 surely no author in the history of our literature 
 who has so imposed a new manner of writing upon 
 an admiring people. He changed a hundred years
 
 A Corrupt Following 45 
 
 of English prose. The dregs of his style have 
 encumbered the nation. Changes that have been 
 ascribed to Johnson were his doing and not 
 Johnson's. 
 
 He belonged to the eighteenth century ; but the 
 nineteenth century belonged to him, because he 
 possessed it. That is why he and his English are 
 thus modern ; the times became conformed to 
 him ; and he was himself not his own age, but that 
 which succeeded and admired him. 
 
 It was to the broad face of astonishment, and 
 with the self-conscious face of novelty, that Gibbon 
 addressed his prose. That shortened sentence 
 (for it was he who shortened the sentence, and 
 Macaulay did but imitate his full stops for the 
 pauses of historical surprise) was to strike and to 
 demonstrate, and this with a gesture constantly 
 renewed. ' Suspicion was equivalent to proof. 
 Trial to condemnation.' ' The strict economy of 
 Vespasian was the source of his magnificence. 
 The works of Trajan bear the stamp of his genius.' 
 His, too, is the full ceremony of the ushering 
 phrase : ' It is easier to deplore the fate, than 
 to describe the actual condition, of Corsica.' His, 
 too, the ' the latter and the former ', which 
 became a favourite fashion. ' Oh, do not condemn 
 me to the latter ! ' exclaims a lover in one of 
 Mrs. Inchbald's stories, after a statement of his 
 hopes and fears ; and this phrase of emotion was 
 a debt to Gibbon. The reader finds that the lady
 
 46 A Corrupt Following 
 
 does not condemn him to the latter ; she permits 
 some prospect of the former. ' Peruse ' is Gibbon's 
 verb, and ' extensive ' a favourite adjective. To 
 him we owe * the mask of hypocrisy ' and ' the 
 voice of flattery \ It is not his fault that posterity 
 divided this property so lavishly among themselves. 
 
 And yet is there no fault in his own frigid 
 prodigality ? Take this sentence in all its splen- 
 dour : ' The Tyber rolled at the foot of the seven 
 hills of Rome, and the country of the Sabines, the 
 Latins, and the Volsci, from that river to the 
 frontiers of Naples, was the theatre of her infant 
 victories.' And this : ' A distant hope, the child 
 of a flattering prophecy.' This all-inhuman image 
 reminds us, by contrast, of Shelley, who often has 
 this figure of a child, and never, however remote 
 the thought, without a sense of childhood. So 
 cold is Gibbon that when the incessant stimulation 
 of his rhetorical intention spurs him to describe 
 a murder thus : ' A thousand swords were plunged 
 at once into the bosom of the unfortunate Probus,' 
 we are moved to tell him trivially that he exag- 
 gerates. When Burke said ' A thousand swords ' he 
 meant a thousand, and had a right to mean them, 
 but Gibbon did not, obviously, mean a thousand. 
 
 ' The unfortunate Probus ' is the model of a 
 sentence that sometimes becomes monotonous 
 even with the carefully various Gibbon : ' The 
 prudent Atticus ' begins a phrase, and ' the 
 equitable Nerva ' passes it on to ' the cautious
 
 A Corrupt Following 47 
 
 Athenian ', and then again to ' the generous 
 Atticus '. His is a frigidity that deals broadly 
 with massacre and the sack of cities. And from 
 amid these generalities, as it were invisible unless 
 viewed from afar, he suddenly plucks us this 
 man's ' smile ', or that man's ' blush '. Whatever 
 Gibbon's race, there never was a writer so 
 exceedingly Latin in spirit. 
 
 'To view', by the way, is one of his favourite 
 verbs : ' Viewing with a smile of pity and indul- 
 gence the various errors of the vulgar . . . and 
 sometimes condescending to act a part on the 
 theatre of superstition, they concealed the senti- 
 ments of an atheist under the sacerdotal robes.' 
 Readers with a sense of humour may remember 
 under what conditions Zenobia ' reiterated the 
 experiment ' ; and the fatal manner in which the 
 tradesman's circular of to-day has ' diffused ' (as 
 Gibbon would say) the last ruins of his prose by 
 post, is rather curiously illustrated thus : a little 
 while ago some infamous face-wash was described 
 in advertisements as a mixture of drugs brought 
 across the desert by fleet dromedaries. And here 
 is Gibbon's Zenobia ' mounting her fleetest 
 dromedary \ 
 
 How great, nevertheless, how sombre are the 
 nobler habits of his language : ' The veteran 
 legions of the Rhine and the Danube.' What 
 armies! what time! what space ! what war! 'Give 
 back my legions, Varus ! ' Give back our legions,
 
 48 A Corrupt Following 
 
 Gibbon ! Wc may count our regiments, but thou 
 hast named, not counted, multitudes. 
 
 And when Gibbon ' gratifies ' these legionaries, 
 the polite word does but make them more historical : 
 ' After suppressing a competitor who had assumed 
 the purple at Mentz, he refused to gratify his 
 troops with the plunder of the rebellious city.' 
 So that we do not forgive the corrupters who so 
 scattered the word that burlesque was necessary 
 for sweeping it out of the way. When Mr. Micawber 
 confesses his ' gratifying emotions of no common 
 description ', Dickens rallies a distant Gibbon. 
 
 Ruskin, student of Hooker in the further, and 
 of Johnson in the nearer, past, was the first writer 
 of pure prose — the first by a long tale of years — to 
 reject the whole encumbrance of the vain spoils 
 of Gibbon ; yet even he has one little patch of 
 them : ' A steep bank of earth that has been at all 
 exposed to the weather contains in it . . . features 
 capable of giving high gratification to a careful 
 observer.' It is solitary in Modern- Painters ; it 
 is the nether Gibbon, a waste product of Gibbon. 
 
 But now I spoke of burlesque ; and Dickens's 
 burlesque of style is admirable ; there is also 
 a burlesque of another and more innocent kind : 
 when the author of a recent English work on the 
 Divine Comedy says that Paolo and Francesca 
 were to receive from Dante ' such alleviation as 
 circumstances would allow ', that also is a distant, 
 a shattered Gibbon, a drift of Gibbon.
 
 THE SWAN OF LICHFIELD 
 
 Mjss Anna Seward should not be made answer- 
 able for the poetry of the late eighteenth century 
 but that no office or responsibility could be con- 
 ferred upon a more willing recipient ; the honour 
 is hardly more than she demanded from the respect 
 of the age to come ; and when she bequeathed her 
 works to this great man for editing, her letters to 
 that, and her name to posterity, she would have 
 heard with the satisfaction of her conscious hopes, 
 rather than with elation or surprise, that another 
 century would charge her with all the accumulated 
 opinions of 1799. 
 
 It is Mr. Lucas's witty commentary 1 that recalls 
 the name of Anna Seward and her claim to speak 
 for those days — the time between two ages. 
 I have no intention whatever to write of her with 
 irony. Neither has Mr. Lucas yielded to the 
 obvious temptation. There is something worthy 
 of no slight respect in the justified security of her 
 representative attitude. To deride her would be 
 to deride that age, almost the latest that had full 
 confidence, that took its historic place absolutely, 
 without reluctance, suffered no misgiving, and did 
 not disturb the order and course of history. 
 
 The centuries before our own. have resembled 
 a river whereof the direction is known, for it is 
 1 A Swan and her Friends. 
 D
 
 50 The Swan of Lichfield 
 
 still far from the tidal regions of its journey ; so 
 was the course of things in 1799 ; but in another 
 fifty years the stream of the modern age had, as it 
 were, begun to feel the tides. Waves have set in 
 towards the head of the waters, or they double 
 the current of the ebb. Waters breast waters, and 
 travel against the journey of the stream, making 
 brief excursions foot to foot with Time. Or there 
 is a swing that sends the river turning with the 
 tide, outstripping the pace of the natural pilgrimage. 
 
 So was the mind of the nineteenth century 
 lifted and cradled, in suspense like the pause of 
 a vehement heart ; so did it tend to the past and 
 set. to the future, a tidal flux and influx that flew 
 from the end, flowed from the goal, filled and 
 brimmed upper reaches, revisited pastures of 
 yesterday with eager waves, or ebbed with a run 
 and made haste to leave them twice. 
 
 If this, then, was the tidal surge of the stream 
 of letters and the arts, the end of the eighteenth 
 century was almost the last date before the tides 
 began to be perceptible. Almost — for perhaps the 
 days when Walter Savage Landor was seriously 
 discussing the merits of a poem by Miss Chose 
 upon the Queen were really the last of the stream 
 above tides. It may be that the perturbing shock 
 first interrupted the onward flowing just after 
 him. Smooth days, those — there were no doubts 
 as to the way of the wave, and no need to watch 
 the hour in order to know whether backward or
 
 The Swan of Lichfield 51 
 
 forward its course was shaped. A stream is a 
 stately stream above the tidal influence. And in 
 Miss Anna Seward's years the historic river of the 
 mind was unchecked : it glided. 
 
 I think there never was a day of more orderly 
 confidence. The ' taste ', the laws, that had come 
 to pass were the only laws and the only taste that 
 were timely or possible. From the later Milton to 
 Dryden, from Dryden to Addison, Pope, Johnson, 
 Gray, Cowper, Crabbc — the way is a way that has 
 no turning. We mark it with some mingled 
 feelings, but surprise is not one of them. It is 
 much the same in the matter of town architecture. 
 The brick box that came to pass in the building of 
 London streets, in the course of the same age, 
 followed the time of dignity, beauty, and fancy 
 which was Wren's, and all the degrees thereto 
 were in a kind of order. Doubtless, this is why 
 we have learnt, in the fluttering centre of a re- 
 newed architectural town, to look with some 
 degree of esteem upon the black brick box, if only 
 it be truly of that time. And this not because it 
 has a quiet civic majesty of approach to its door 
 a deux battants, and passages and rooms propor- 
 tionate within, but because that very exterior, 
 which was the negation of architecture, was the 
 last truly punctual style of building. And before 
 its day they might be classical, but they were 
 classical in a manner that was of the seventeenth 
 and eighteenth centuries, with an intense spirit 
 
 d 2
 
 52 The Swan of Lichfield 
 
 of the time. Perhaps the clearest sign of the 
 
 times before the beating tides is this — their secure 
 self-confidence ; for they never doubted that their 
 taste was the best and their criticism the result 
 of accumulated judgement. Nay, in the dregs of 
 times — in 1840 — they had faith in their romances, 
 Italian landscape, steel engraving, portraits with 
 large eyes, in a word, in their ' finish ' (the word is 
 ominous) ; and because of their good faith we 
 may deride even these with good humour. 
 
 Now, Miss Seward has an incontestable right to 
 speak in the name of her contemporaries. There 
 is hardly any one else who had all her good faith 
 and solemnity. But first let me pause upon the 
 title given to her with so much dullness and ele- 
 gance — the Swan of Lichfield. The Swan of Avon 
 had at least a river ; he was never the Swan of 
 Stratford-on-Avon. But with all respect to the 
 poet who devised the name for Shakespeare, we 
 may hold that it was not well inspired to suit 
 a poet who sang in his middle days and was silent 
 some time before he died. Let this, however, 
 pass as the perversity of a phrase not without 
 charm. It is the perversity, perhaps, that has 
 made the name so dear and a household word. 
 But at any rate a Swan of Avon could swim, he 
 was not placed on a high road, or in a street, or 
 within the precincts of a cathedral close. The 
 Swan of Lichfield must have been named with an 
 agreeable intention to confer a sweet dignity, and
 
 The Swan of Lichfield 53 
 
 something of that faded dignity remains. The 
 episcopal palace was her home, and she was called 
 a Swan when she was in full career ; they did not 
 wait for a swan-song. 
 
 So close was she to the first beginnings of the 
 tides that she blundered when she left much of 
 her poetry to Sir Walter Scott, not doubting his 
 willingness to serve her as editor. He did the 
 work, with some considerable excisions, and gave 
 the volumes to the world, but in an ' aside ' he has 
 called her poems execrable. So that she was all 
 too confident of the immediate future. Dying 
 early in the nineteenth century, she continued 
 a little too long the assurance of the eighteenth ; 
 that was her sole fault. In regard to her own day 
 she had none. 
 
 It seems even that ' execrable ' is an unjust word. 
 Miss Seward did not attempt to describe a moon- 
 light night without forgoing her bed to match it 
 with a phrase. Her sincerity is not without its 
 literary value, for it succeeds in a measure ; if not 
 fully communicated, it is suggested, and this is 
 no small thing. Moreover, there is a poetic thought 
 — an implicit thought, an inclusion — in her sonnet 
 
 on ' December Morning ' : 
 
 . . . Then to decree 
 The grateful thoughts to God, ere they unfold 
 To friendship or the Muse. 
 
 This surely is not without subtlety ; nor is the 
 final line, in which the reader and student is said
 
 54 The Swan of Lichfield 
 
 to fill his days so full that though he be not old 
 he ' outlives the old '. A poet capable of this sense 
 of present time (for here is no mere commonplace 
 as to future influence or literary immortality ; 
 she means that the outliving is present) — a poet 
 who had this thought might have been a fine poet ; 
 she used her intellect, and that action is the vitality 
 of all poetry that is not song only, but poetry and 
 song. 
 
 This is so high a specimen that I will quote no 
 more. Over Miss Seward's criticism it would be 
 but too easy to make merry. ' For the magnificent,' 
 she says of her century, 4 we have Akcnside, 
 Thomson, Collins, Dr. Johnson, Mason, Gray, 
 Chatterton, Darwin, and the sublime Joanna 
 Baillie ; in the simpler style, Shcnstone, Beattie, 
 Cowper, Crowe, Bowles, Burns, Bloomfield, Walter 
 Scott and his school ; Coleridge, Southey, and 
 their school. Poetry can have no nobler models 
 than these supply to her various styles.' She must 
 have read the ' Ancient Mariner ' ; she names 
 Coleridge with Southey ! 
 
 She had the eighteenth-century love for some- 
 thing that was not purity of style. I think that the 
 critics of our own day have hardly perceived the 
 violence of an age that wrote ' taught the doubtful 
 battle where to rage ' ; ' red Arbela ' ; ' gory 
 horrors crowned each dreadful day ' ; ' the madding 
 crowd ' ; ' maddened o'er the land ' ; and a thou- 
 sand other things in tatters. Miss Seward rebuked
 
 The Swan of Lichfield 55 
 
 a writer for stealing ' gulphy ' from Pope. 
 4 Gulphy ', she thought, was too good to steal. 
 ' He stole the picturesque epithet " gulphy " 
 from Pope ' : 
 
 And gulphy Xanthus foams along the field. 
 
 1 Than which a more poetic line,' she decides, 
 ' was never written.'
 
 JOANNA BAILLIE 
 
 Would Joanna Baillic's Plays on the Passions 
 have been so shunned by later generations' and 
 then so forgotten, if the writers of Literary His- 
 tories had remembered to mention the ' Comedies 
 on the Passions ' as well as the ' Tragedies ' ? 
 For every tragedy Joanna Baillie, whose plan 
 of dramatic labours was drawn up with a singular 
 completeness, wrote also a comedy ; and one at 
 least of these sprightlier plays is so buoyant, so 
 busy, so apt in speech, and so pleasant, within the 
 limits of eighteenth-century wit, that a modern 
 manager might surely do worse than try his luck 
 with it. 
 
 If any man should desire to possess the full 
 intention of Joanna Baillie in her undertaking, 
 in her dealing with the Passions, he may have it 
 in a great many pages of most explicit introduction, 
 with her own decisions on all such controversies 
 as those touching the individual and the type, in 
 tragedy. Joanna Baillie had thought out all such 
 matters. But her few readers are, perhaps, con- 
 tent to take as read this treatise, with its good 
 sense and its very small charm. She knows well 
 what she is abcut, this at any rate is certain : 
 and when she addresses herself with a most simple 
 sense of responsibility to the tragic presentation
 
 Joanna Baillie 57 
 
 of Hatred, Remorse, Jealousy, and Fear, her 
 good faith and gravity, and the admirable manner 
 in which she puts the murderer to school, nearly 
 quiet the reader's natural resentment and inclina- 
 tion to revolt. 
 
 With average good will and a fair readerly 
 spirit, you may take these resolute tragedies, with 
 their enormous parti pris, as works of no despicable 
 art. Joanna Baillie would by no means permit 
 you to slight her art. She has a passage in which 
 she disclaims the crude intention of setting up 
 the image of a single passion as the whole nature 
 of a man. If there were no conflict, she says, 
 there would be no force, for the passion would 
 have nothing to compel, to break or bend, within 
 the passionate heart. But neither, will she allow 
 the units of humankind to puzzle us on the 
 tragic stage with their asymmetry of nature. 
 Her jealous man has other impulses for jealousy 
 to grapple with, but they serve his jealousy so. 
 She will not endure, as she tells us, eccentricity. 
 
 Add to this manner of planning an eighteenth- 
 century blank verse of the second order, and you 
 have the drama which seemed Shakespearian to 
 many. 
 
 It is not too much to say that any other drama 
 — Antiquity and Shakespeare apart — would have 
 had grave reason to be proud of Joanna Baillie. 
 Her plays seem to be built up and locked together 
 soundly ; they close with a conventional but not
 
 58 Joanna Baillie 
 
 obtrusive dignity. Knowing the Passion that has 
 been the theme, you are apt to turn to the final 
 speech over the hero's long-vexed body, the 
 comment that proclaims an impartial sentence in 
 tragic peace, and you find no weaknesses ; the 
 silence follows upon no manifest failure. Vivacity 
 among the smaller characters, and some of the 
 strength of the ages (being the strength of tradition) 
 in the greater, leave her tragedies in no mean 
 place ; leave them there too literally, for few are 
 the readers to put them to any test or question. 
 In their day they and the ' metaphysical preface ', 
 as Mrs. Thralc calls it, were the occasion of some 
 sayings hard to our ears. ' A masculine perfor- 
 mance ' is the expected opinion, duly expressed, 
 but we are not so well prepared for Sir Walter 
 Scott's reply to Lockhart : ' If you wish to speak 
 of a real poet, Joanna Baillie is now the highest 
 genius of our country.' 
 
 It is the comedy following the tragedy of ' Basil ' 
 that takes my fancy. Love seems to be the 
 passion in hand, and Joanna Baillie makes such 
 pretty eighteenth-century sport of her theme 
 (her hero keeping the fine sensibilities, expressed 
 with impassioned elegance, of Steele's Conscious 
 Lovers) that it is not easy to realize that she 
 passed the middle of the nineteenth century, 
 albeit in extreme old age. Of the preceding 
 tragedy I will say merely that one may detect in 
 it a fancy of Antiquity, as the eighteenth century
 
 Joanna Baillie 59 
 
 dressed it, which is wonderfully pleasing : a little 
 boy, Mirando, vexes the capricious heroine by 
 naming her lovers ; he creeps into her arms and 
 begins to trouble her free heart, making guesses 
 for sugar-plums. The reader likes to think that 
 by a candid allegory, fit for Sir Joshua Reynolds's 
 painting of a gold-headed boy and a brown-eyed 
 maid, Miss Joanna Baillie had given the name of 
 Mirando to none other than Love himself, Cupid 
 the bee. 
 
 But to the comedy. It is called ' The Trial ', 
 and turns upon the device, since repeated, per- 
 haps, more than once, of shuffling a couple of 
 heroines, so that she who is the heiress may 
 disguise herself in the dresses of her penniless 
 cousin, and receive impertinences, suffer neglect, 
 and also test the true heart proffered in in- 
 tention to her as a girl without wealth. It is 
 the exceeding sweetness of the two good girls 
 bent upon their frolic (which is also a romp) 
 that makes the charm of this happy play. They 
 exchange names upon the wildest impulse consis- 
 tent with their Georgian manners. They are 
 audacious and decorous ; confess their quest, 
 which is for a ' sensible lover ' ; busy themselves 
 therein, make inquiries, hide behind screens, plot 
 together the exposure of the fortune-hunter, 
 acknowledge the full value of their own beauty, 
 and this with a propriety all of its own time. 
 
 Agnes has the better wit as well as the gold,
 
 6o Joanna Baillie 
 
 but the lesser beauty. She it is who lays the plot, 
 and persuades the uncle, when he would fall out 
 with her and her cousin, to second their game. He 
 would not, he avers, make a holiday mummery 
 for their pleasure, and his wig is too old for a ball. 
 4 Nay, don't lay the fault upon the wig, good sir, 
 for it is as youthful and as sly, and as saucy- 
 looking as the best head of hair in the county. 
 As for your old wig, indeed, there was so much 
 curmudgeon-like austerity about it that young 
 people fled before it, as, I daresay, the birds do 
 now.' As for the unlucky ' fops ' — the fops whom 
 Joanna Baillie brings forward and overthrows in 
 incredible effigy, after the fashion of the other 
 satirists — Agnes, or, rather, her cousin Mariane, 
 is troubled by many. Each one is mimicked in 
 the dressing-room dialogues of these two enter- 
 prising rogues, and the appropriate humiliation 
 is prepared for each with all precision. ' Such 
 a man must be laughed at, not scorned ; contempt 
 must be his portion.' Mariane falls in : ' He 
 shall have it then. And as for his admirer and 
 imitator . . . any kind of bad treatment, I suppose, 
 that happens to come into my head will be good 
 enough for him.' This last is pretty wit. So is 
 this gipsy's reply to her uncle's reproof in regard 
 to her dealings with yet another : ' He would 
 not let me have time to give a civil denial, but 
 ran on planning settlements. ... I could just get 
 in my word with a fiat refusal as he was about to
 
 Joanna Baillie 61 
 
 provide for our descendants to the third genera- 
 tion. . . . He is only angry that he can't take the 
 law of me for laughing at him.' 
 
 Even when you hear of the ' genteel young man, 
 with dark grey eyes, and a sensible countenance ', 
 and are at once aware that it is indeed he, this 
 charming Agnes is hard to capture. As he walks 
 backwards before her with a play of homage 
 (for he too can be light) she mocks him with her 
 dance, and dances him up the stage and out at 
 the door. And if there were any living actress 
 who had the eighteenth-century propriety it 
 would be pretty to sec her do it. The eighteenth- 
 century baggages ! They called their admirers by 
 their surnames tout court, and their breeding was 
 admirable. 
 
 Hardly less pleasant is the comedy on ' Hatred ', 
 in which a candidate for a parliamentary election 
 hears good news about his detested rival : ' Art 
 thou sure that they laughed at him ? In his own 
 inn and over his own liquor ? Ha, ha ! ungrateful 
 merry varlets ! ' 
 
 She, who had this humour, to be called ' the 
 highest genius in our country ', and to be so taken 
 up with ' the passions of human kind ' ! One of 
 the eulogists of her tragic power calls her ' un- 
 deviating ' ; yet she deviated delightfully.
 
 THE CLASSIC NOVELIST 
 
 Jane Austen seldom begins a novel without 
 a deliberate chapter — generally a family chapter.' 
 A masterly consciousness of her own authority 
 gives her the right of control over her reader's im- 
 patience or slovenliness. The order of things is hers, 
 not his, and he must wait her time for wit. Hers 
 are what Jeremy Taylor, even at his prayers, calls 
 ' measures of address '. Her openings imply a 
 firmer hold upon narrative than later novelists, 
 with their vcrbless first sentences, their ' he ' and 
 ' she ' for persons to be named later, thought to 
 grasp at. The moderns would be much depressed 
 were they required to open thus : ' The family of 
 Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. Their 
 estate was large, and their residence was at Norland 
 Park, in the centre of their property, where, for 
 many generations, they had lived in so respectable 
 a manner as to engage the general good opinion of 
 their surrounding acquaintance.' We consent to 
 read the dismal opening ; we endure the pother of 
 the unmusical words ; we tolerate it all because we 
 know that in a page or two the respectable Dash- 
 woods will be deprived of some of the general good 
 opinion of their surrounding acquaintance. We 
 know that Miss Austen will make of her personages 
 good sport for her reader, her sense of derision being
 
 The Classic Novelist 63 
 
 equal to that of her own kin, the original Philistines. 
 For another example, would any later author, 
 having a Mrs. Bonnet to deride for our delight, 
 consent to introduce her thus : ' Mrs. Bcnnet was 
 a woman of mean understanding ' ? But in this 
 case Miss Austen's art loses nothing, even by the 
 chill of that presentation. 
 
 That Jane works upon very small matters is 
 hardly worth saying, and certainly not worth com- 
 plaining of. Things are not trivial merely because 
 they are small ; but that which makes life, art, and 
 work trivial is a triviality of relations. Mankind 
 lives by vital relations ; and if these are mean, so 
 is the life, so is the art that expresses them because 
 it can express no more. With Miss Austen love, 
 vengeance, devotion, duty, maternity, sacrifice, 
 are infinitely trivial. There is also a constant rela- 
 tion of watchfulness, of prudence. As the people 
 in her stories watch one another so does Miss Austen 
 seem to be watching them, and her curiosity is 
 intense indeed ; she realizes their colds — her female 
 characters take a great many colds — so that one 
 seems to hear her narrate the matter in a muffled 
 voice, but not precisely because of her sympathy. 
 That such close observation can work on without 
 tenderness must be a proof of this author's exceed- 
 ing cynicism. 
 
 Triviality of relations among Miss Austen's 
 personages does not prevent a certain kind of 
 intensity. Lying and spite among her women work
 
 64 The Classic Novelist 
 
 at close quarters. With the men we hear of a some- 
 what wider range; there is, in the case of one justly 
 rejected suitor, a suspicion, a rumour of ' Sunday 
 travelling ' ; the accusation is not precisely brought 
 home. 
 
 No one who has not read Pride and Prejudice and 
 Emma is able to say that he knows worldliness in 
 its own proper home. There, ' engaging the general 
 good opinion of surrounding acquaintance ' (the 
 mouthful of thick words !) worldliness keeps its 
 dowdy and hopeless state and ceremony. There is, 
 in almost every second page of Miss Austen, a detes- 
 table thing called, in the language of the day, 
 1 consequence '. No slang of our own time, by the 
 way, has ever misused a word more foolishly. To 
 ' consequence ', and to the heroine's love of it, is 
 promptly sacrificed all that might have seemed the 
 beginnings or suggestions of spirituality. There is 
 more that is spiritual in the heroines of to-day — in 
 the ' female animal ' herself — than in Anne, in 
 Harriet, in Jane, in Fanny, or in any other of the 
 young women who gossip through the pages of these 
 famous novels. The men gossip, too ; they are 
 minutely occupied with the engagements, colds, 
 arrowroot, tea-parties, and correspondence of the 
 women. 
 
 All this, it may be said, relates to Miss Austen's 
 subjects and not to her perfect art. But Miss 
 Austen's art and her matter are made for one 
 another. Miss Austen's art is not of the highest
 
 The Classic Novelist 65 
 
 quality ; it is of an admirable secondary quality. 
 Her gentle spinsterly manner prevents us from per- 
 ceiving at first how much of her derision — for she 
 is mistress of derision rather than of wit or humour 
 — is caricature of a rather gross sort. ' Lady 
 Middleton resigned herself to the idea with all the 
 philosophy of a well-bred woman, contenting her- 
 self with merely giving her husband a gentle repri- 
 mand on the subject five or six times every day.' 
 Far finer is Miss Austen's success when she gains 
 her effect by delicate persistence in reiteration. 
 This is the way in which she enjoys Mr. Woodhouse, 
 the old gentleman in whose eyes every woman who 
 has had the good luck to marry out of his tedious 
 house is a ' poor dear '. His compassion makes 
 excellent sport, of a kind, by the effect of cumula- 
 tion. The author's patience and vigilance are, 
 indeed, perfect, insomuch as they never neglect or 
 fail to perceive an opportunity for giving the turn 
 to his phrase, the tone to his word. And the whole 
 thing would advance, by the slow degrees of this 
 method, and close in a little masterpiece, but that 
 something of the fineness, as well as something of 
 the increase, of the result is now and then marred 
 by Miss Austen's own explanation. She prepares 
 her reader deliberately ; she instructs him at the 
 outset in what he would have become convinced 
 of at the end. 
 
 Her irony is now and then exquisitely bitter. 
 ' Who could tell ' — Miss Austen is presenting the 
 
 E
 
 66 The Classic Novelist 
 
 thoughts of Mrs. John Dashwood in regard to her 
 unwelcome sisters-in-law — ' that they might not 
 expect to go out with her a second time ? The 
 power of disappointing them, it was true, must 
 always be hers. But that was not enough.' About 
 the following little sentence there is something of the 
 wit of surprise. It describes the joys of a young 
 woman of the less admirable sort, lately married : 
 ' They passed some months in great happiness at 
 Dawlish ; for she had many relations and old 
 acquaintances to cut.' Miss Austen has a word in 
 dismissing the inconstant Mr. Willoughby : ' His 
 wife was not always out of humour ; and in his 
 breed of horses and dogs, and in sporting of every 
 kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic 
 felicity.' 
 
 The lack of tenderness and of spirit is manifest 
 in Miss Austen's indifference to children. They 
 hardly appear in her stories except to illustrate the 
 folly of their mothers. They are not her subjects as 
 children ; they are her subjects as spoilt children, 
 and as children through whom a mother may re- 
 ceive flattery from her designing acquaintance, and 
 may inflict annoyance on her sensible friends. The 
 novelist even spends some of her irony upon a little 
 girl of three. She sharpens her pen over the work. 
 The passage is too long to quote, but the reader may 
 refer to Sense and Sensibility. In this coldness 
 or dislike Miss Austen resembles Charlotte Bronte. 
 
 Most dully expressive are Miss Austen's country
 
 The Classic Novelist 67 
 
 houses. One description places her people in a few 
 words in the scene that suits them with a quite 
 subtle suitableness ; and the thing is presented in 
 words which, here again, by their very lack of music 
 define mediocrity : ' Cleveland was a spacious, 
 modern-built house, situated on a sloping lawn. 
 The pleasure grounds were tolerably extensive ; 
 and, like every other place of the same degree of 
 importance, it had its open shrubbery, and closer 
 wood walk ; a road of smooth gravel, winding 
 round a plantation, led to the front.' There, there 
 in the modern-built mansion was the goal of the 
 hopes of heroines. To the shrubbery they betook 
 themselves, in a ' hurry of spirits ', or other limited 
 forms of emotion that might make them wish to 
 escape remark. In and out pottered the men — the 
 men of the period, the men of so strange a sex. In 
 the tolerably extensive grounds walked ' conse- 
 quence ', and its wheels marked the smooth gravel 
 that wound round the plantation. 
 
 Before quitting the noble subject of ' conse- 
 quence ' let it be noted that Emma had the follow- 
 ing hesitation about a youth she was inclined to 
 admire (Emma was not twenty-one) : ' Of pride, 
 indeed, there was perhaps scarcely enough ; his 
 indifference to a confusion of rank bordered too 
 much on inelegance of mind. He could be no judge, 
 however, of the evil he was holding cheap.' It is an 
 unheavenly world. 
 
 E2
 
 A HUNDRED YEARS AGO 
 
 An old book called The Mirror of the Months, 
 published anonymously in 1826, seemed, at a glance, 
 to a random reader, to contain little thin springs 
 of thoughts that walked the world in volume and 
 dignity fifty years later. There was nothing else to 
 hint that the book was the work of the father of 
 a poet, but the father of one among all poets was 
 manifestly the author. Soon after, the same reader 
 found it attributed, in a bookseller's catalogue, to 
 P. G. Patmore. 
 
 The earliest or the directest spring is called the 
 source of a river ; but we know not how far apart 
 and on what scattered watersheds rose the tributary 
 waters, early and late, that filled a splendid sum- 
 moning and gathering stream, and charged it with 
 rains of the four courts of heaven. It need not 
 dismay us to find the one discoverable source to be 
 something so slight as — for example — a passage on 
 the month of February in The Mirror of the Months 
 (it is hardly worth quoting) whereof the ode on 
 ' St. Valentine's Day ' of Coventry Patmore was the 
 ultimate fulfilment. Yet a reader may be reluctant 
 to find a small thought, lying cold in a minor mind, 
 to be the certain beginning of a great thought in an 
 illustrious mind ; the perfectly recognizable yet 
 insignificant origin of what we love is more sur-
 
 A Hundred Years Ago 69 
 
 prising than would be a stranger beginning. Per- 
 haps we feel this unwelcome surprise because we 
 had been too ready to believe that what is original 
 is strong, and what is original is warm. It was 
 easier to think of a first impulse tiring or becoming 
 more composed, of a passion gradually losing light 
 and flame, than of this increase, kindling, and 
 quickening. It is because the small source of ' St. 
 Valentine's Day ' is really authentic that its in- 
 adequacy does little less than startle us. At any 
 rate the incident is one that may instruct us in the 
 history of that second step which is momentous in 
 intellectual things. 
 
 Furthermore, the ambiguous questions of here- 
 dity seem thereby to gain in mystery ; and some 
 things must needs gain in mystery before we can 
 at all undertake to think upon them. Without 
 mystery they are all obscure. Who can think, 
 for instance, of the infinity of space without add- 
 ing inconceivable things to his meditation ? And, 
 in like manner, the bond of fathers and sons 
 seems to become somewhat more intelligible if 
 we add to the comparatively easy thought of the 
 responsibility of a father for the mind of a child 
 some confession of the retrospective answer to 
 be exacted from the child, inasmuch as in the 
 child is the fulfilment of what was but prophesied 
 in the father, whom the son at last justifies. 
 
 In 1826 Leigh Hunt must have dominated unduly. 
 The Mirror of the Months would evidently have been
 
 70 A Hundred Years Ago 
 
 graver, fresher, and more frank, in thought and in 
 English alike, but for the example of the excessive 
 amiability that makes Leigh Hunt's poem of 
 Rimini, among others, ridiculous. It was a mere 
 fashion, apparently, and it is not difficult to imagine 
 that even Leigh Hunt could talk with a better 
 simplicity than the simplicity of the universal 
 literary smile he practised in his books. There is 
 something that does but ape the humane, the 
 liberal, the gracious. It is an early nineteenth- 
 century attempt at the favour and prettiness of the 
 Elizabethans, with an absolute rejection of the 
 Elizabethan ' horrors '. 
 
 Yet without ' horrors ', without a real murder 
 among the dances, without royal madness em- 
 bowered, and noble distraction wearing flowers, 
 without the wild convention, without the noble 
 spirit, wilder than nature — a barbaric artifice 
 outfacing nature — what were the Elizabethan 
 favour and prettiness worth ? Nay, they would 
 never have been there but to adorn frightful deeds. 
 The men of a hundred years ago took one part and 
 left the other, and were delighted in the civilized 
 choice they had the grace — as they held it — to make, 
 in a tolerant rebuke, in a liberal approval, of the 
 great past. And see the fruit of that choice. Not 
 being fond of Leigh Hunt, I had not read Rimini 
 until a year or two ago, and now already the most 
 conspicuous memory I have of the story of that 
 poem is the memory of an incidental picnic.
 
 A Hundred Years Ago 71 
 
 It is possible, of course, that my angry fancy may 
 have exaggerated the cause of its own derision — 
 and that the event sung in the canto in question 
 may have been some modification of a picnic ; as 
 it were a mitigated picnic ; I have not the poem for 
 reference. Nevertheless, there stands a picnic of 
 some sort — a contribution of the English man of 
 letters to the story of the Adriatic cities and of the 
 antecedents of Dante's Hell. 
 
 A picnic, I maintain it, a drive, a cloth under the 
 trees, are there. I am quite certain, at any rate, 
 that the place chosen therefor is called by Leigh 
 Hunt, in so many words, ' a rural spot '. 
 
 A far greater man than Leigh Hunt — nay, 
 there is no common measure of comparison — has, 
 by some ill luck, at nearly the same moment 
 of our literary history, also made the same Fran- 
 cesca da Rimini the subject of some entirely nine- 
 teenth-century feeling. I speak of Walter Savage 
 Landor, and of the exquisite passage of the 
 Imaginary Conversations (the Pentameron). What 
 he does he does, unlike Leigh Hunt, with 
 genius ; but — one must have the courage to say 
 so — in error as complete as the little writer's. The 
 reader may be reminded of that tender page about 
 Francesca : ' She stops : she would avert the eyes 
 of Dante from her : he looks for the sequel : she 
 thinks he looks severely : she says, " Galeotto is the 
 name of the book," fancying by this timorous little 
 flight she has drawn him far enough from the nest
 
 72 A Hundred Years Ago 
 
 of her young loves. No, the eagle beak of Dante 
 and his piercing eyes are yet over her. " Galeotto 
 is the name of the book." " What matters that ? " 
 " And of the writer." " Or that either ? " At last 
 she disarms him ; but how ? " That day we read no 
 more." Such a depth of intuitive judgement, such 
 a delicacy of perception, exists not in any other 
 work of human genius.' And this judgement, for 
 greater misfortune, he puts into the mouth of 
 Boccaccio, because he loved him, and intended that 
 he should speak from Landor's heart ; and so, 
 indeed, he does. But the day of Boccaccio was not 
 ours, and there is no possible exchange of hearts. 
 Are we candid if we persuade ourselves to find these 
 pauses in the speech of Francesca ? I protest that 
 I read the line in one cold breath of almost in- 
 different anger. 'The name of the book ', as Landor 
 has it, is not in Dante at all. ' A pander was that 
 book, and the writer thereof,' is simply what the 
 Francesca of Dante says. 1 
 
 To come back to The Mirror of the Months. This 
 is a volume so full of charm that it is something less 
 
 1 Francesca calls the book a Galeotto and him who wrote 
 it a Galeotto, because ' Galeotto ' was then the synonym for 
 ' pander '. Galeotto (Gallehault) was he who brought Lanci- 
 lotto and Ginevra to their first sin, according to the Tavola 
 Rotonda, a romance popular in Francesca's time. Dante 
 had none of the pretty and complex meanings imputed to 
 him by Landor. Dante, the insistent moralist, simply 
 intended a simple warning against dangerous reading ; he 
 was in this obedient to a Bull (in 1313) whereby the Pope 
 condemned La Tavola Rotonda — one of the earliest books 
 to be thus banned.
 
 A Hundred Years Ago 73 
 
 than just to reproach it so hastily with Leigh Hunt's 
 universal literary smile. Something of that it has, 
 indeed, but it has also the smile of spirit and that 
 of sweetness. Of two wits of yesterday two phrases, 
 for example, are familiar in admiring quotation : 
 ' The age of indiscretion', and 'Yes, nature is creep- 
 ing up', or, in another form, ' Not like his portrait? 
 He will be like it.' Every one recognizes the phrases 
 so well that there is perhaps not a reader in England 
 who needs to be more than reminded of them. Now 
 1 the age of indiscretion ' is in The Mirror of the 
 Months, where it got no fame, or little; and ' Nature 
 is creeping up ' is fairly anticipated in the passage : 
 1 Cattle wade into the shallow pools of warm water, 
 and stand half the day there stock still, in exact 
 imitation of Cuyp's pictures.' Take this description 
 of the parent birds' business of bringing out their 
 young broods and dismissing them, ' while they (the 
 parents) proceed in their periodical duty of pro- 
 viding new flocks of the same kind of " fugitive 
 pieces ", as regularly as the editors of a magazine.' 
 And this for a mere laugh : 4 The only specific 
 reason why I object to March is that she drives 
 hares mad ; which is a great fault.' 
 
 Moreover, the procession and recession of the year 
 is here noted in the garden and in the open field of 
 England by senses full of spirit. The separate and 
 atmospheric effect of an oat-field among all other 
 grain is well expressed in the phrase where the oats 
 are said to hang ' like raindrops in the air '. And
 
 74 A. Hundred Year s Ago 
 
 the author has eyes for the scarcely perceptible and 
 most slender growth that in July pricks through 
 the short and level turf and makes the grassy downs 
 live in the winds, as poplars make the woods. 
 ' April ', says this forgotten writer, ' is worth two 
 Mays, because it tells of May ' — a subtlety some- 
 what like that of his son's minor fancies. 
 
 And finally another small spring of the poetry 
 to come in the following generation is in the mere 
 phrase ' The pomp of health and the lustre of loveli- 
 ness '. Coventry Patmore, with the poet's finer 
 verbal art, had afterwards 
 
 So much simplicity of mind 
 In such a pomp of loveliness.
 
 THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES 
 
 There arc some writers whom the judicious 
 reader forgets by name, with the express intention 
 of clearing them away. For oblivion is not always 
 a slovenly thing. It is sometimes directed with no 
 slight care, and has regard to all the distinctive 
 characteristics of the one to be forgotten, effacing 
 him with every possible precision, good aim, and 
 attention. Others, again, it is more convenient 
 to forget in little companies, according to their 
 ' school ' ; and there is no great precision neces- 
 sary for picking them off. You shoot, as it were, 
 ' into the brown', for they go close-ranked. 
 
 Of Beddoes it must be said that if he is to be 
 virtually forgotten — and there is hardly a doubt 
 as to that — the act has to be a single and separate 
 one. And yet this measure of distinction is not 
 quite fairly come by. He gains it chiefly because 
 he wrote Elizabethan tragedy in the early nine- 
 teenth century, and so gained a kind of isolation. 
 But inasmuch as he wrote couplets to be like 
 Keats, and lyrics to be like Shelley, he might 
 disappear with a batch, and need give no trouble. 
 He was not without talent, and he should have our 
 cordial pity for living in a time when the inspira- 
 tion of English poetry was withdrawn. When — 
 for a far longer period — this had befallen before,
 
 j6 Thomas Lovell Beddoes 
 
 there had been no one living aware of the lapse. 
 When Shelley and Keats were gone, Wordsworth 
 and Coleridge at an end, Beddoes was aware of 
 what had happened, and knew all the conditions 
 in which his own life had come to pass. He may 
 remind you of a poor rabbit that came to con- 
 sciousness in the midst of a physiological experi- 
 ment. Generally the anaesthetic lasts as long as 
 the trouble. But Beddoes had the distress of 
 being an Englishman during a pause of poetry 
 that must have seemed a final loss to his solitary 
 consciousness. We know the shortness of the 
 time, but if the struggle of his dismay was violent, 
 and if he caught at the past — the immediate past 
 and the distant — with a frantic gesture, shall we 
 deride him who did not know the future that is 
 now our past ? The gap hardly shows in our view 
 of the mountain range of poets. 
 
 If Beddoes thought that he was called upon to 
 live a citizen of an England with no present 
 literature, it is not wonderful that he should have 
 been a desperate man. It was desperate to be so 
 unwilling to confess that Keats would write no more 
 couplets as to make this after Keats was dead : 
 
 And none went near ; none in his sweep would 
 
 venture, 
 For you might feel that he was but the centre 
 Of an inspired round, &c. 
 
 It is not, perhaps, quite Keats's rhyme ; but the 
 helpless leaning on the rhyme, the unbraced
 
 Thomas Lovell Beddoes 77 
 
 couplings, the slipping, the giving way of those 
 two poor props of lines ill-built, are all proper 
 to Endymion. So are the same things in this 
 couplet, where the character of the words chosen 
 for rhyming is also, almost subtly, a piece of 
 Keats : 
 
 Thou know'st it not ; it is a fearful coop — 
 Dark, cold, and horrible — a blinded loop 
 In Pluto's, &c. 
 
 Here, again, is a passage so full of all the errors 
 of this deplorable way of couplet writing that it 
 shall be put upon record here as a final warning 
 before it is finally forgotten. The passage begins 
 in the course of a line (and therefore after another 
 wretched couplet has fallen down just above), 
 and the phrase, quite unable to stop itself, needs 
 two and a half more couplets to come before it is 
 precipitated, and reaches a stable equilibrium by 
 coming to the bottom : 
 
 There sits, 
 
 Or stands, or lounges, or perhaps on bits 
 
 Of this rag's daughter, paper, &c. 
 
 Beddoes studied Elizabethan blank verse, and 
 achieved no small measure of imitation, if hardly 
 the astonishing success of these unheroic couplets. 
 In The Bride's Tragedy he imitates more than 
 the versification. The large passions, removed 
 from the conditions of human life and yet closing 
 in that human accident — madness — the playing 
 with flowers and prettiness in the horrors of
 
 78 Thomas, Lovell Bed docs 
 
 a murder, the curiously aloof appeal to the inti- 
 mate replies of pity and terror ; the state, the 
 royalty ; the barbaric convention, the savage and 
 noble unnaturalness, where naturalness would 
 seem to be the looked-for motive, justification, 
 crown, and end — for the sake of these Elizabethan 
 characters Beddoes wrote his tragedy, and, but 
 for a wavering into sentimentalism (less than any 
 of his contemporaries would have shown, no 
 doubt), he would have made something wonder- 
 fully like his model. But sentimentalism was 
 generally a vice of his time from which Beddoes 
 was strangely free. It is in his imitation of that 
 inimitable favour and prettiness, and in the 
 kind of aristocratic madness of a song, that the 
 mistake comes to pass — the mistake of this over- 
 wrought decoration for the sentiment that is so 
 near and yet so unlike to it. When Hesperus, who 
 has murdered his bride and is to die, lies down 
 before his distraught father and covers himself 
 with the loose earth, he undoubtedly does an 
 Elizabethan action. And when his father, dying 
 of grief, lies down beside him, that too is Eliz- 
 abethan, more Elizabethan still than the other. 
 But when Hesperus says : 
 
 But I shall die the better for this meeting, 
 
 then, it seems to me, the feeling is modern ; and 
 so it is elsewhere. Then it seems inconsistent to 
 reproach Beddoes because he is not modern
 
 Thomas Lovell Beddoes 79 
 
 enough, and writes of dragons and not of men. 
 But yet, who has not acknowledged the effect of 
 Rossetti's phrase, ' lidless eyes in hell ' ? Thai 
 human eyes should ever be lidless — that is 
 Rossetti's frightful thought. Beddoes also has 
 ' lidless eyes ', but he gives them to a dragon, 
 and it matters less than nothing that a dragon 
 should have lidless eyes. Coleridge, by the way, 
 had ' her lidless dragon eyes '. 
 
 Neither passion nor sweetness is frequent with 
 Beddoes, but once or twice in the course of many 
 lyrics on the subject of death he apprehends 
 Shelley's thought of death, and sometimes there is 
 a Shelley-shyness, an escape in the moment of 
 capture, or an alien nestling and murmuring, close 
 and strange : 
 
 What hast caught, then ? What hast caught ? 
 Nothing but a poet's thought ! 
 
 There is something more than his customary fancy 
 in his phrase for love, ' Bee of hearts ' ; and in 
 the almost tender song, Dream- Pedlary : 
 
 If there were dreams to sell, 
 
 What would you buy ? 
 Some cost a passing bell, 
 
 Some a light sigh. 
 
 This, too, of a sad romantic story : 
 
 Like a ruffled nightingale 
 Balanced upon dewy wings, 
 
 Through the palace weeps the tale, 
 Leaving tears where'er she sings.
 
 8o Thomas Lovell Bcddoes 
 
 This is a strong image in a fragment, Concealed 
 Joy: 
 
 Just now a beam of joy hung on his eyelash ; 
 But as I looked it sank into his eye, 
 Like a bruised worm writhing its form of rings 
 Into a darkening hole. 
 
 The poetry of madness is, needless to say, one 
 of the peculiar choruses of English literature. To 
 the centuries of wild conventions, of distracted 
 majesties, of artifice outfacing nature and astonish- 
 ing the untamed heart, to the greatness and the 
 liberty of the English fancy, the world owes those 
 musical light discords, from the song of Tom o' 
 Bedlam, quoted by Isaac DTsraeli, to the mad 
 song by Aubrey de Vere, and the stanzas added 
 to the first-named by Francis Thompson ; for he 
 seems to be the latest of a long line of English 
 poets to make music for the distracted. Beddoes 
 addresses himself to the kind of resolute pathos 
 that set all these singers to singing. For the 
 pathos was most resolute ; however sweetly it 
 sounded at the full, it had cold origins. Imagina- 
 tion and simplicity, not passion, made all its virtue. 
 I cannot think that Beddoes in Emily's Plaint has 
 fancy or simplicity fine enough for the addition of 
 this song to the heart-broken, heart-released lyrics 
 of Ophelia and her sisters. 
 
 Beddoes' lyrics of death are rather German than 
 magical — I feel these adjectives to be somewhat 
 antithetical in this connexion ; and they call him
 
 Thomas Lovell Beddoes 81 
 
 ' grim '. But he lacked humour. His reference to 
 a place — 
 
 That 's not genteel to tell, 
 Where demonesses go to church, 
 
 is the best thing I can find in that temper.
 
 GEORGE DARLEY 
 
 It was Beddoes who gave this half-forgotten 
 poet, his contemporary, the name of violence. 
 Being conscious of the brief and unimportant 
 pause of poetic inspiration during which they 
 lived, Beddoes wrote a letter of dismay wondering 
 whether it were to the sentimental L.E.L. or to 
 the violent George Darley that the trust of English 
 poetry should be committed. It was, as we now 
 confess with peace of mind, to neither ; and there 
 is a lesson to be learned from the desperate ques- 
 tion — to the effect that all is not lost because an 
 interregnum befalls and the crown of poetry is 
 visibly put by. Beddoes was in distress for his 
 twenty years or so. The twenty years close up in 
 the natural perspective, and the utterance of that 
 anxiety sounds futile and uneasy, breaking in upon 
 sounds of more moment. 
 
 George Darley's violence, such as it was, had 
 its way principally in a choice of words intended 
 to retrieve the language from the Teutonism that 
 began its fashion before he died in the middle of 
 the century. He apparently did not hold the 
 English language to be finally closed in, and in 
 this he agreed with other and greater men who 
 have used all their strength, at times with a single
 
 George Barley 83 
 
 hand, feo hold that door open. But perhaps Darley 
 was not always careful enough of the difference 
 between scholarly Latinisms and those whereof 
 a poet in his haste might not stop to test the 
 doubtful scholarship. 
 
 Apart, however, from the Latinisms, which are 
 not many, there is with Darley a certain delight 
 in quaintness which makes of Teutonic words 
 a disagreeable kind of slang. ' Streamy vales ', for 
 example, is not a welcome phrase. Like to this is 
 the prank of writing ' bittern ooze '. The am- 
 biguity makes the words even grotesque ; for the 
 poet is writing of a marsh ; is he then making 
 the word ' bitter ' more ' quaint ', or is he taking 
 the name of a bird for an adjective ? Either way 
 he is trifling. But as George Darley died a dis- 
 appointed man, and as his poetry had light and 
 space in it, and there was lacking the perception 
 of these in his readers at the time, it is rather his 
 beauties than his faults that shall be dealt with 
 here. Life, light, and distance — in poetry — seem 
 to leave on the mind's eye the impression of red, 
 yellow, and blue, radiant less or more according as 
 the life is less or more impassioned, the light 
 celestial, and the space remote ; though no red, 
 not even red veiled by the blond and tender 
 colours of humanity, shines in Darley's verse, 
 there is assuredly no dimness in his gold nor 
 dullness in his azure. At the first page of Ne- 
 penthe the reader takes a larger and more liberal 
 
 F2
 
 84 George Darley 
 
 view of the world of the poet before him, reading 
 this line on the daytime sun 
 
 High on his unpavilioned throne. 
 
 It is followed, unfortunately, by some common- 
 places, but in itself it is fine. Less beautiful, but 
 also a felicity for the visionary eye, is the phrase, 
 'that huge-meadowed plain'. It is, at any rate, 
 a word to sigh for in the narrow town and the 
 narrow winter. 
 
 George Darley wrote of fairies — a dull subject, 
 let us confess at last ; and more than half of 
 his drama of Sylvia, the May -Queen, is acted by 
 fairies and fiends at war. But there are some 
 happy fancies even in the prattle of fairy-queens 
 to their courtiers, as where Morgana rallies her 
 tender followe." : 
 
 I've seen thee stand 
 Drowning amid the fields to save a daisy. 
 
 And again : 
 
 Thou once didst cherish 
 In thy fond breast a snowdrop dead with cold. 
 
 Darley was as resolute an Elizabethan as 
 Beddoes, but while Beddoes darkened his skies 
 for the drama of passions graced with trivial 
 flowers blooming in an angry light, Darley 
 addressed himself rather to the imitation of the 
 humour and the prcttiness. He copied the 
 Shakespeare of the Midsummer Night's Dream, 
 and though the critics say that his rustics are
 
 George Darley 85 
 
 tedious, it seems to me an unjust judgement. 
 Granted the delight that Shakespeare finds in the 
 derision of clowns as they blunder with words too 
 long for their fortunes, and it is not fair to say 
 that Darley is really a bore. His Andrea in the 
 May-Queen makes no bad sport of that kind. 
 Darley has the situation and the quality of the 
 laughter from Shakespeare, but the phrase is of 
 his own exceeding ingenuity ; and when the 
 transformed serving-man meets that dapper elf 
 Nephon, there is some very fair success in the 
 frolicking. ' Where is this mighty small-spoken 
 gentleman ? ' asks Andrea (unluckily Darley did 
 not know that the penultimate of this Italian 
 name is long). ' Hillo, Signor Nobody ; at what 
 point of the compass must I look, to be mannerly ? ' 
 The most charming thing in the play is this 
 exquisite beginning of the song of a fairy who has 
 lost the mortal lady in her care : 
 
 Where can my young beauty be 
 That I have not found her ? 
 
 Out alas ! this is not she, 
 With a shroud around her ? 
 
 This is beautiful and ancient versification and 
 rhythm. But Darley had never got free from 
 the habit of anapaestic vulgarities, out of date 
 with all he wrote ; and immediately after that 
 delicate verse he begins again to caper : 
 
 For the pride of the valley, the flower of the glen, 
 
 and so forth.
 
 86 George Darley 
 
 Among the phrases that give a flash to the 
 verse is one, of graver value, that seems to recall 
 something of Coventry Patmore's ' bright anger '. 
 And Darley takes a flight about the world, in his 
 happy mood and his foreboding, and there are 
 rich lines in his landscape, such as these : 
 
 And mine ear rung with ocean's roar, 
 And mine eye glistened with its blue. 
 
 With how much perception, how pliant a turn 
 of thought, how instant a reflection, how delicate 
 a sense of mood and habit Darley could play the 
 seventeenth-century poet is proved by his famous 
 lyric, It is not beauty I demand, with this among 
 its stanzas : 
 
 Tell me not of your starry eyes, 
 Your lips that seem on roses fed, 
 
 Your breasts where Cupid tumbling lies, 
 Nor sleeps for kissing of his bed. 
 
 In the first edition of the Golden Treasury this 
 poem, of then unknown authorship, was placed, 
 carefully timed, between Wotton and Carew. It 
 seems to have been withdrawn altogether when 
 its writer was found to be of the nineteenth 
 century.
 
 SYDNEY DOBELL 
 
 It would be better to be purely forgotten, and 
 then rediscovered (or not, as may befall) than to 
 be half remembered, or remembered by rumour, as 
 Sydney Dobell seems to have been for many 
 years, and compromised by the praises that send 
 a straightforward reader shying and swerving to 
 left or right — anywhere out of the way of their 
 finger-posts. Oblivion is clean, but not so the 
 encumbered remembrance, and not so the reputa- 
 tion taken into custody and care by the Intro- 
 ductory Memoir. 
 
 There is a small accessible volume of selections 
 from Sydney Dobell's poems, of which the bio- 
 graphical and critical introduction is more than 
 usually disheartening. It is apparently by several 
 hands, and one of them has the most uncertain 
 hold upon grammatical collocation, while others 
 seem to express in the thick English of a certain 
 period the portly zeal of the writers for a poet who 
 had associations with their own youth. It is, of 
 course, easy not to read an introductory memoir ; 
 and this one should not be read by those who 
 might charge the poet with the insignificant 
 sincerity (equal in literature to insincerity) of the 
 honest critics who admired him. There must
 
 88 Sydney Dobell 
 
 have been better things written in his praise than 
 these. We know, for instance, Rossetti's admira- 
 tion (carelessly and thinly alluded to in his rather 
 vacant letters to Allingham) for Keith of Ravel- 
 ston ; and the poets who were Dobell's contem- 
 poraries must surely have had something better 
 to offer him than the dull enthusiasm of biographical 
 introductions. He was a lyrical poets' lyrical 
 poet, in this sense : the thought, the motive, the 
 thing for which his best lyric lives, is not only 
 a poetic thought, it is also a brief one. It closes, 
 it is finished in shape, it holds well within the 
 verse. There are, needless to say, long thoughts 
 and short thoughts, which are fit for poetry, 
 reconciled from the beginning with the poetic 
 intellect, and justified by themselves. It is the 
 brief thought that is so essentially lyrical. Take, 
 as an example, the conception of which was born 
 the poem called Isabel. She who is dead was, 
 in love, in piety, in grief, too shy for life, more 
 spiritual, more wild, and more warm than the 
 world, losing her in her own light, and not so 
 much as knowing her for a secret creature, had 
 ever seen her to be. Therefore her poet chooses 
 no time but the dark summer dawn and the 
 summer sunrise for his songs and for his memories. 
 Her path had missed men's footsteps, and he 
 travels into the hours that also are aloof, to think 
 of her with the thoughts of the imagination. 
 I have thus reluctantly disarrayed the phrases of
 
 Sydney Dobell 89 
 
 the poem in order that the reader may have the 
 short thought at a glance. 
 
 All fine sonnets and other poems in brief final 
 forms have in like manner brief thoughts — large, 
 great, but short. A short thought which is poetic 
 is the highest inspiration of the lyric poet, even 
 though there may be many and many a splendid 
 lyric that has it not, but is as unclosed as the 
 passage of a bird in flight. So are the greater 
 number of the poems of Sydney Dobell ; he has 
 not the perfect inspiration of the short thought 
 always, or even often. That inspiration dis- 
 tinguishes Isabel greatly. Of that poetic poem 
 let me give a stanza or two — 
 
 That early hour I meet 
 The daily vigil of my life to keep, 
 Because there are no other lights so sweet, 
 Or shades so long and deep, 
 Isabel. 
 
 And best I think of thee 
 Beside the duskest shade and brightest sun, 
 Whose mystic lot in life it was to be 
 Outshone, outwept by none, 
 Isabel. 
 
 This poem has assuredly rare sweetness and 
 much rarer passion in its solitary tones ; it has 
 in a small measure the emotion of the hours 
 of sleep, as the waking heart still owns it in face 
 of the breaking of a summer dawn. The short 
 thought is the matter and form again of those
 
 90 Sydney D obeli 
 
 two sonnets whereby chiefly Dobell's name is now 
 remembered — The Army Surgeon and Home in 
 War Time. When a poetic short thought is 
 transfigured in a single beautiful image, then the 
 sonnet is satisfied, the sonnet is fulfilled. It 
 remained for the English poets so to conceive the 
 sonnet, not re-arraying but creating it. Of these 
 two sonnets it is The Army Surgeon that has 
 this fundamental completeness ; the other has 
 not imagery, though it has, with extraordinary 
 finality, the short thought. In both imagination 
 is intellectual and visual, and the tide of impas- 
 sioned feeling is a high tide, that has lifted all the 
 poet's blood. These are not, perhaps, in the full 
 sense, great poems ; they have not the peace 
 which seems, beyond all our understanding, to 
 make an eternal quality of poetry of the tumult 
 of Lear. They are poems of emotional unrest, 
 but among poems of emotional unrest they are 
 singularly fine and true, and something at least 
 of the fusing work of passion is done upon their 
 beautiful diction. 
 
 All in all, the whole series of war-poems have 
 a strange success. They were written during the 
 Crimean war, and they have all the best quality 
 of their time, which may be called good faith. 
 Sydney Dobell takes his types as all the Romance 
 poets and their posterity knew, them, and he does 
 not lie in wait for the accidents and incidents of 
 fragmentary life. He has a milkmaid in all her
 
 Sydney D obeli 91 
 
 symmetry, a Lady Constance in hers, a French 
 chasseur, a wounded officer, a market wife ; they 
 are all conventional. But if the poet found his 
 persons ready for him in a not all unwise legend, 
 he did no small thing in filling them full of warm 
 traditionary life. It may well be that the more 
 modern author achieves somewhat less — or perhaps 
 it would be better to say that he achieves his 
 work at a less expense of life — when he makes 
 his human creature (his unit with all the natural 
 lack of unity) to live and to be seen by its natural 
 singleness ; when he so marks the gnarls and 
 knots of the life, surprised in a separate man, as to 
 give proof of a man by his very accidents. It may 
 well be easier work to do thus than to do as Sydney 
 Dobell does with his expected Romance, breathing 
 so fully. The one poet shall not justly charge the 
 other with any unhandsome or slovenly dealing. 
 
 There Is, however, one poem in the war series 
 which has another kind of life than that of the 
 milkmaid's song. This is one of the finest — 
 Tommy's Dead. Who shall say that this poem 
 of actual knowledge, and of a life lived, is not 
 better than the rest ? More full of the poet's 
 authentic life it may not be, but the thing is 
 better worth doing. Tommy's father is a single 
 and separate creature, and every line of his song 
 is a strong surprise, though it is but of the thin- 
 ness, the dullness, and the last old age in a day of 
 bad news at the farm.
 
 92 Sydney Dobell 
 
 On the gther hand, The Little Girl's So)ig is 
 only in part the cry of a child ; and yet even in 
 the least childish lines, there is the excuse that 
 the poet, in the urgency of his feeling, has broken 
 through the limitations of the childish speech 
 because he could not restrain the haste of his own 
 pity-driven word. The little girl's father is at 
 the war, and she wonders whether indeed she sees 
 her mother wasting with grief, or whether that 
 face was always so pale. The trivial word of the 
 child — ' Papa ' — seems to make the line more 
 forlorn : 
 
 Do not mind my crying, Papa, I am not crying for 
 
 pain ; 
 Do not mind my shaking, Papa, I am not shaking 
 
 with fear ; 
 Though the wild wind is hideous to hear, 
 And I see the snow and the rain. 
 When will you come back again, 
 Papa, Papa ? 
 
 The beautiful Keith of Ravelston is in the 
 series of Crimean poems ; and some who know its 
 undefined sweetness and its mystery may not be 
 aware with how admirable an art Sydney Dobell 
 introduces its vague outlines. It is a song sung 
 by one who is happy in the year of sorrow — 
 
 She sings the sorrow of the air, 
 Whereof her voice is made. 
 
 Then follows the strain of Romance in an 
 immemorial cadence :
 
 Sydney D obeli 93 
 
 The murmur of the mourning ghost 
 That keeps the shadowy kine ; 
 
 4 Oh, Keith of Ravelston, 
 The sorrows of thy line ! ' 
 
 I must own that Balder and The Roman have 
 not yet persuaded me to read them through ; 
 but the lyrics, if so chosen that a certain vein of 
 weakness may not appear anywhere, are surely 
 a perdurable part of our incomparable literature.
 
 COVENTRY PATMORE 
 
 To prophesy that the odes of Coventry Patmore 
 shall be confessed, a hundred years hence, high 
 classic poetry, is assuredly to promise the critics 
 of a hundred years hence high classic quality in 
 their judgement. It is to look for a definite 
 intelligence and for an explicit code of literary 
 law, inasmuch as a mind trained in the less obvious 
 measures and restraints both of thought and of 
 verse is needed to recognize the law of The 
 Unknown Eros. It is to look, not only for such 
 precision, but for its rare companions — liberty, 
 flight, height, courage, a sense of space and a sense 
 of closeness, readiness for spiritual experience, and 
 all the gravity, all the resolution, of the lonely 
 reader of a lonely poet. Whatever criticism may 
 learn in time to come, The Unknown Eros will 
 hardly then have many readers, and will no doubt 
 still keep the accidental loneliness that surrounds it 
 now by reason of the indifference of the majority ; 
 but its essential loneliness is its own quality, con- 
 ferred by no world's neglect ; not an effect of 
 conspicuousness or difference; not a mere contrast, 
 for it is relative to nothing. 
 
 The reader undertakes at least to know and to 
 watch that solitude. It was assuredly a sense of 
 the gravity of this enterprise that inspired the
 
 Coventry Patmore 95 
 
 phrase, ' lonely watcher of the skies ' ; a star is 
 lonely, and its student, whatever his conditions, 
 lonely as he watches. Pausing upon that significant 
 phrase, we ask for a moment whose it is. Not 
 Keats's, evidently ; and it proves at last to be 
 a word of Patmore's own ; and the lonely 
 watcher is his rapt and vigilant reader. In 
 a now cancelled passage of Coventry Patmore's 
 ode, Tired Memory, occurs the ' lonely ' astrono- 
 mer. Who can complain that there are not many 
 prepared for such a vigil ? Moreover, The Un- 
 known Eros, although we may attempt images 
 of sidereal distance to express its profound flight, 
 has the more dreadful solitude of an experience, 
 and goes far in an inverse flight, through the 
 essentially single human heart — intimately into 
 time and space, remotely into the heart of hearts. 
 
 Of many words of praise, the word ' classic ' is 
 chosen here because it suggests no exclusions of 
 schools or kinds, nor even any preferences for 
 poetry of one kind of perfection, to the slighting of 
 poetry of another. None the less is it the most 
 sharp and severe of all words of criticism, or it 
 shall here have that character, if the reader will 
 agree to understand as ' classic ' all poetry that 
 is one — thought and word. The fusion of thought 
 and word is unmistakable, whether the fire of an 
 impassioned thought bring it to pass, or the close 
 coldness of fancy made perfect ; for since we hear 
 that metals pass into one another, in vacuo, by
 
 96 Coventry Patmore 
 
 pressure in the cold, this latter image is possible ; 
 but even if, with Thomas a Kempis, we contem- 
 plate the metal that is one with fire and is changed 
 into fire, it is less by the fusion of fire that 
 a greatly classic poem is to be figured, than by 
 a more vital union ; mind and body, where tidal 
 thought and feeling are quick with the blood and 
 various with the breath of life, give a juster, as 
 well as a simpler and a human, image of a vital 
 poem. Besides, the fire of life is made sensible to 
 us by warmth and not by flame, and there are 
 in literature a far greater number of humanly 
 warm poems that are classic and vital, than of 
 poems that are classic and vital with apparent and 
 uncovered flame. Some of these last, indeed, 
 there are, but few. The image of warm life is 
 the general measure of poetry. Then is poetry 
 proved classic and alive when a reader, struck to 
 the heart, moved and shaken like Leontes looking 
 on the figure of Hermione, having seen her colour, 
 her height, her light, her age, knows her indeed, 
 and confesses her at last by another sign : ' Oh, 
 she 's warm ! ' 
 
 In The Unknown Eros the poet's intention, 
 single, separate, strikes unique strokes against 
 which the reader's human heart is all unarmed by 
 custom. It is mastery, and not violence, that so 
 comes home, dividing soul and spirit. There is 
 not a violence in the world that does not seem 
 a dissipation and an essential weakness when
 
 Coventry Patmore 97 
 
 reproached by such a majestic energy, able to 
 curb its hand. 
 
 Not without profoundly conscious art did 
 Coventry Patmore achieve the ultimate, the 
 mortal, pathos of such an ode as Eurydice. He 
 was ready to tell the secret which no others could 
 use as he used it, however it might be guessed ; 
 and the secret of Eurydice was : ' After exceeding 
 ill, a little good.' The slenderness of the good 
 and the poignancy of the ill arc mingled, in this 
 ode on dreams, with such closeness of fear as no 
 other poet has ever endured. Eurydice is the 
 dream of the mourner, who night by night follows 
 some dreary clue through labyrinths without 
 hope, to find the dear dead living the thin, remote, 
 neglected life that the dead do live in these intoler- 
 able dreams. But Coventry Patmore does not always 
 capture terror for such purposes of eternal sadness ; 
 he is able to marry terror to joy in the magnificent 
 ode of reunion, The Day after To-morrow : 
 
 O, heaving sea, 
 
 That heav'st as if for bliss of her and me, 
 And scparatest not dear heart from heart, 
 Though each 'gainst other beats too far apart 
 
 O, weary Love, 0, folded to her breast, 
 Love in each moment years and years of rest. 
 
 • • • • • • . • • 
 
 Life, too liberal, when to take her hand 
 Is more of hope than heart can understand.
 
 98 Coventry Pafmorc 
 
 One day's controlled hope, and one again, 
 And then the third, and ye shall have the rein, 
 O Life, Death, Terror, Love ! 
 
 Ultima dolcezza was once exquisitely said of the 
 skylark ; ultima amarezza should be the words for 
 the lines : 
 
 Thou whom ev'n more than Heaven lov'd I have, 
 And yet have not been true, even to thee ; 
 
 and the extremity of grief without bitterness, the 
 grief that kisses and says a conscious ' farewell, 
 farewell ', is in Departure, and in this passage of 
 too significant allusion, with years of tears lightly 
 implied by a negative : . 
 
 When the one darling of our widowhead, 
 
 The nurseling Grief, is dead, 
 
 And no dews blur our eyes 
 
 To see the peach-bloom come in evening skies. 
 
 Nor does a public sorrow utter less life and death. 
 The ode entitled Proem foretells with a singular 
 peace of grief the day when England, ' a dim 
 heroic nation, long since dead', shall be benignly 
 remembered no otherwise than by ' the bird-voice 
 and the blast of her omniloquent tongue ' — by the 
 poets of her then dead language. 
 
 As to the ' natural description ' for which the 
 reader is apt to look — it might not unfairly be 
 said that Patmore never described. He claimed 
 the truths of science, to which in youth he had 
 devoted his attention, to serve his poem with
 
 Coventry Patmore 99 
 
 images ; and thus he used them in his speech, as 
 when the perception he gained of Divine truths 
 by the act of contemplation and the holding his 
 spirit still, ready, and free, was likened by him to 
 the photographic picture of stars invisible even to 
 the camera but made visible by a long accumu- 
 lation of continuous imperceptible impressions. 
 And nature, evasive to the mere describcr, yielded 
 imagery to him with an indescribable freshness. 
 There is an instance in the ode, Wind and Wave, 
 with its final flash of sea and sea-margins, and 
 waves that 
 
 Traverse wildly, like delighted hands, 
 The fair and fleckless sands 
 
 • ••••••• 
 
 And burst in wind-kissed splendours on the 
 deafening beach. 
 
 The smile of Psyche is 
 
 Like sunny eve in some forgotten place ; 
 love shows in the dark eyes of the dying woman, 
 
 As when a south wind sombres a March grove. 
 
 In Amelia we receive the candid, simple shock 
 of the line in which every meeting with her beauty 
 is likened to a first beholding of the ocean. In 
 this ode, also, stands the ' little bright, surf- 
 breathing town ', and the westering sun fills with 
 shade ' the dimples of our homeward hills '. 
 Whenever Coventry Patmore touches nature it is 
 with a sudden sight, often it is also with a sudden 
 
 g 2
 
 ioo Coventry Patmore 
 
 insight. The blackbird at dawn, a lonely thrush 
 at evening, singing notes few and fine, and ' sad 
 with promise of a different sun ', brought him in 
 full the message of the wild suggestion that never 
 left poet's heart at rest. When he wrote the Odes, 
 and used thus a free metre because he knew him- 
 self to be set at liberty by his very knowledge and 
 love of law, that heart beat in the sensitive line, 
 and he caught rapturous breath, or sighed, as 
 a spirit blowing whither it will. 
 
 The quality of poetry is not strained. It has 
 not to abide our repeated question. It tests and 
 is not tested. Every true lover of poetry knows 
 that when he cites great lines it is not the poetry 
 but the hearer that is to be judged. This true 
 lover may well have outlived the desire to give to 
 others a convincing or converting reason for his 
 own certainties as to the most poetic things in 
 poetry, but he still desires to know whose mind's 
 ear is fine, and how many have the ear, as time 
 goes on. To the treasure of these most beautiful 
 things, to which the dramatic and the epic poets 
 have given passages or phrases, the lyric poets 
 stanzas or lines, it is a wonder to find how much 
 Coventry Patmore has added. The slender volume 
 of his odes furnishes them out of all measure. 
 Even those readers who will not hold the author 
 of that small volume to have answered all the 
 conditions on which a poet is acknowledged great, 
 will confess this extraordinary disproportion. The
 
 Coventry Patmore 101 
 
 mental apprehension of poetry can be put to the 
 proof by Patmore's odes — and indeed by not 
 a few passages of the contemned Angel in the 
 House — much oftcner than by honoured classical 
 poems from which we gather those testing lines by 
 precious threes and twos. The Unknown Eros 
 yields them to us in overwhelming beauty and 
 in strong numbers. Some have that poetry of 
 imagery — so enkindling, so exalting that we say 
 of imagery that it is poetry itself, until we find 
 the poetry of the yonder side, for some again are 
 of the simplicity, the further simplicity, that is 
 beyond imagery. One of the testing lines of our 
 literature has this latter character — Chaucer's, 
 chosen by Matthew Arnold, on the lot of man : 
 
 Now with his love, now in the colde grave. 
 
 From Coventry Patmore's odes we gather them 
 with both hands, exalted, subdued, and greatly 
 moved by our riches. 
 
 Why The Unknown Eros should have found so 
 few readers it might be hard to say. We should 
 have expected something different from the 
 literary liberty and literary variety of England. 
 Ignorance of Patmore's odes might have been 
 looked for, that is, from readers fairly of one mind 
 in the admiration of Byron and Scott, but it is 
 not easily to be explained in readers of various 
 minds admiring Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, Cra- 
 shaw, Campion, Blake, Milton, and Shakespeare
 
 102 Coventry Patmore 
 
 the lyrist. Probably a doubt as to the whole 
 meaning of many among the odes has discouraged 
 even Patmore's willing readers. The beauty was 
 there, but it was to them an uncertain magnifi- 
 cence, a glow from a doubtful fire, a pealing call 
 of an uncertain word, remote as thunder, the 
 heart-piercing utterance of an obscure grief — 
 obscure as waters are obscure because they are 
 profound, not because they are turbid. Some of 
 our esteemed poets have left us meanings troubled 
 by the lowest of difficulties — the grammatical. 
 Their waters have matter in mechanical suspension 
 rather than in chemical solution. It is often 
 impossible to decide to what nouns some of the 
 pronouns in Sordello refer. But Patmore's pure 
 diction, uttered in the composure that gives high 
 dignity to his most poignant poems, permits no 
 such baffling of inquiry. Nevertheless some of 
 the odes of The Unknown Eros arc difficult. Some, 
 we say, and arc again puzzled at finding them so 
 few. The Day after To-morrow is not readily 
 understood to refer to reunion after death ; the 
 Psyche odes sing of a spiritual experience alien to 
 the history, to the aspirations, and even the 
 desires, of the greater number of deeply spiritual 
 men ; the matter of the mystical ode called The 
 Unknown Eros itself is all but hidden ; Deliciae 
 Sapieniiae de Amore darkly sings the triumph of 
 virginity and its sacrifice at once ; few or no 
 readers will guess the Arbor Vitae of a very fine 

 
 Coventry Patmorc 103 
 
 ode to bo the Catholic Church, and the ' nests of 
 the hoarse bird, who talks and understands not 
 his own word ' to be (a most unjust image) the 
 clusters of her clergy ; and a few other necessities 
 for explanation there may be. But, on the other 
 hand, there can be no doubt, to all initiate in the 
 world of poetry, as to the full significance — the 
 furthest significance, to every inner alley and 
 retreat of meaning, to every ultimate pang of 
 sensitiveness — expressed in that terrible record of 
 a mourner's dreams, Eurydice ; in Departure ; in 
 // / were dead ; in Saint Valentine's Day ; or in the 
 ode on the decline of England, already named, which 
 contains the memorable description of her literature. 
 Why, of these all-intelligible poems, is only one 
 generally known, even with the relative general- 
 ness possible among the little minority that cares 
 for poetry ? That one is, needless to say, The 
 Toys, a very beautiful and tender poem, but one 
 containing less essential poetry than any other 
 page of the odes. 
 
 It must be owned that some of the accessory 
 persons and conditions of the story of The Angel 
 in the House are unwelcome to poetry as we have 
 learnt to hold it. But this is an avowal that we 
 are either content, or very weakly, very ineffec- 
 tually, ill content, to live in a social world that we 
 confess to be unworthy of poetry. Coventry 
 Patmore, as we understand his attitude, refused
 
 104 Coventry Patmore 
 
 to be content with such a world, and refused, 
 moreover, to be impotently discontent. If the 
 world was unfit for his poem, he would reject the 
 world — and he at least knew how to reject and 
 did not play at rejection. He did not believe that 
 there was such unfitness, because love and immor- 
 tality were there, as elsewhere, with humanity. 
 The modern age chose to be ashamed of the 
 manner in which it chose to live, to be associated, 
 to prosper, to order its affairs ; no other age had 
 condescended to that kind of shame. But Coventry 
 Patmore was not modern in this matter. He 
 thought the daily civilized ways of a Cathedral 
 town, granted that they were delicate and gay, 
 and not dull, no more unfit for ' realistic ' art 
 than other contemporary ways, neither delicate 
 nor gay, have been held to be before, and notably 
 since, the writing of The Angel in the House. 
 Coventry Patmore wrote of conventions in the 
 manner of a realist, and he had for this precedents 
 older than his critics stopped to remember. If so 
 much of explanation is to be offered in answer to 
 still current criticisms, how does it befall that any 
 reader should pause upon the mure intervals in 
 poetry so profound and penetrating as, in a hundred 
 passages, shakes the metre with a hand of control ? 
 Among such passages are these records of beauty : 
 
 Her eyes incredulously bright, 
 
 And all her happy beauty blown 
 Beneath the beams of my delight.
 
 Coventry Pat more 105 
 
 So much simplicity of mind 
 
 In such a pomp of loveliness ! 
 Eyes that softly lodge the light. 
 
 And elsewhere are words that touch the heart so 
 close as these : 
 
 His only Love, and she is wed ! 
 
 His fondness comes about his heart 
 As milk comes when the babe is dead. 
 
 And again : 
 
 Alone, alone with sky and sea 
 And her, the third simplicity. 
 
 Here is a quatrain winged, not weighted, with 
 meaning : 
 
 Far round each blade of harvest bare 
 
 Its little load of bread ; 
 Each furlong of that journey fair 
 
 With separate sweetness sped. 
 
 Again : 
 
 Blest in her place, blissful is she ; 
 
 And I, departing, seem to be 
 
 Like the strange waif that comes to run 
 
 A few days flaming near the sun, 
 
 And carries back, through boundless night, 
 
 Its lessening memory of light. 
 
 It is possible that this early poem is contemned 
 because the reader takes the ' Angel ' to be the 
 woman, and an angel obviously feminine is a kind 
 of sentimentality. But I prefer to take the 
 ' Angel ' to be Love. Patmore's masculine mind
 
 106 Coventry Patmore 
 
 probably referred the name rather to such an 
 angel as he who in the Old Testament took up 
 a prophet by the hair of his head and carried him 
 across country. Together with Love, Patmore's 
 subject was the Child in the House, before ever 
 Pater had so varied Patmore's title. Together 
 with the revelation of youthful love he has coupled 
 all the sweet revelations made to a child : 
 
 This and the Child's unheeded Dream 
 Was all the light of all his day. 
 
 We find that there are two master-emotions in 
 modern poetry — in that Romance literature which 
 has been the complementary life of Europe now 
 for many centuries ; one dates from Dante's day, 
 and one chiefly from the day of Henry Vaughan 
 (Wordsworth's virtually immediate precursor). 
 Love, and the love of Nature, mystically passionate, 
 are what they are with us, not because all men, 
 but because two boys, conceived them. It needs 
 the childish dream to raise these emotions into the 
 regions of mystery, sweetness, tenderness, and 
 terror which they have gained because Dante was 
 a child in love with a girl, and Vaughan a child in 
 love with Nature. Other lovers have loved in 
 childhood, or else they have profited by Dante's 
 childhood ; other poets have conceived the passion 
 for Nature in their childhood, or have profited by 
 the childhood of Wordsworth, of Vaughan, and of 
 Traherne. The wilder and the more real, the more
 
 Coventry Palmore 107 
 
 delirious and the more innocent these remote 
 experiences, the more has the lover's love the 
 quality of Romance, and the poet's imaginative 
 verse the quality of the poetry of Nature. Men 
 could never have done for mankind what these 
 boys have done ; literature owes her two ideal 
 adult passions to the dreams of childhood. 
 
 Coventry Patmore's ardour and mystery acknow- 
 ledged that dear and ignorant origin. He did more 
 than remember that incomparable antiquity ; 
 with him childhood hardly needed remembering, 
 for it remained, the companion of his complete 
 intellect, the rapture of his profoundly experienced 
 heart, the strange and delicate witness of manly 
 sorrows. 
 
 The most beautiful of all gardens is assuredly 
 not that which is rather forest or field than 
 garden, the ' landscape garden ' of a false taste ; 
 nor, on the other hand, the shaven and trimmed 
 and weeded parterre with an unstarrcd lawn ; but 
 rather the garden long ago strictly planned, 
 rigidly ordered, architecturally piled, smooth and 
 definite, but later set free, given over to time and 
 the sun ; not a wilderness, but having an enclosed 
 wildness, a directed liberty, a designed magnifi- 
 cence and excess. Comparable to such a garden is 
 Coventry Patmore's mind, obedient to an ancient 
 law, but wildly natural under an inspiration of 
 visiting winds and a splendid sun of genius. 
 
 No poet ever had a greater value for poetry or
 
 108 Coventry Patmore 
 
 attributed to it a greater dignity than the value 
 and the dignity that consecrated it in Patmore's 
 heart. As he very literally and actually held the 
 members of the body to be divine, so may it be 
 said that he saw in poetry also the incarnate word ; 
 the metre, the diction, the pause, the rhyme, the 
 phrase were not accidental but essential. Hence 
 his extraordinary mastery of style. And as to his 
 sense of the greatness of poetry as a power and 
 domination we have but to compare it with the 
 sense of one who spared no words in praise of 
 poetry, and who speculated boldly as to its work 
 and mission — Matthew Arnold. 1 Failing the re- 
 ligious sanction, failing the fundamental law with 
 its code, poetry, Arnold thought, might take its 
 place, whether as temporary regent or regent 
 without a term. It would, he said, console and 
 soothe mankind. As though a race in need of 
 the spur and the curb, the example, the threat, 
 and the canon, were sufficiently to be served by 
 those unmanly ministrations ! As though to be 
 soothed in an ill-temper and comforted in an ill- 
 humour were the chief necessities of men, a race 
 worthy of the dignities of chastisement ! In 
 raising poetry to what he thought this eminence, 
 assuredly Matthew Arnold did it no honour. Never 
 
 1 He thought the value of the religions to be their ' un- 
 conscious poetry '. ' It is part of the man's unconscious 
 poetry,' says Harold Skimpole — he is alluding to the family 
 butcher (unpaid) — ' that he always calls it " his little bill ".'
 
 Coventry Palmare 109 
 
 was poetry more conscious than Patmore's. Nor, 
 perhaps, if we seek among the homages of the 
 poets to their art shall we find graver or pro- 
 founder veneration than Patmore's, hardly even 
 excepting Wordsworth's, explicit and implicit. 
 
 He valued his country chiefly for her poets. So 
 must we learn to do, and to value her for him.
 
 POETRY AND CHILDHOOD 
 
 Which is the language of poetry ? For each, 
 perhaps, the language that first named for him 
 a flock of sheep, a hill, a mountain river, or what- 
 ever thing touched a child's mind with a remote 
 and yet familiar love. The poets who have for 
 him a lifelong advantage over all others arc the 
 poets who write that tongue. No other word 
 than theirs will be to him the very name of what 
 he finds so fresh. Thus, for my own part, reading 
 again the Chants du Crepuscule, the Feuilles 
 d'Automne, Contemplations, and Voix Inte- 
 rienrcs, I own the power of the poet who knows 
 the true name of an orchard, and so calls it ' le 
 verger '. ' Lc verger ' is purely yonder steep field 
 of fruit-trees round and soft above their separate 
 shadows. In another tongue the name is translated, 
 and therefore removed by one step ; it has no 
 longer the shape and figure and spirit which the 
 name first known has for the child learning the 
 thing and the word in one. 
 
 Besides, Victor Hugo falls in with the mood of 
 one who has profound childish memories con- 
 nected with his common words, by writing so 
 closely of infantine things as though to secure the 
 charm for all a reader's lifetime to come, and to 
 establish the authority of his French precisely
 
 Poetry and Childhood in 
 
 upon those names of childish import thai are 
 most subject to such an early spell. 
 
 A reader who, when he had learnt that there 
 are birds, had learnt their English name, and had, 
 moreover, received his father, his mother, his bed, 
 his sleep, his nurse's song, his little breakfast, in 
 English, has not, I think, an equal poet to rehearse 
 for him those words, those things rather, in his 
 later years. For there seems to be no poet in 
 our master-poetry to do for him that singular 
 office, and to sing the language of his first nurse 
 to a great and authentic lyre. He may learn all 
 nature with our poets, and he hears the Gospel 
 first in an incomparable tongue ; and his first 
 sense of Greece doubtless comes with an adequate 
 word. But he has no august poet to resume his 
 ancient lullabies, heard once in ancient regions 
 between sleeping and waking, the immemorial 
 night-light, the homely language of antiquity and 
 old romance as children have the sense of them in 
 their little words at play upon the floor, at play 
 upon the moss. He has not had Victor Hugo's 
 French. 
 
 Furthermore still, an English reader whose 
 childish life was uttered in French has half for- 
 gotten, amid later English, some of the daily words 
 of that time, unused by grown men and women. 
 These Victor Hugo sings to him. They return to 
 him out of the past and out of his poetic page at 
 once. They had but dropped to sleep in imperish-
 
 H2 Poetry and Childhood 
 
 able memory ; they wake again, and they are 
 more fresh to his heart than swallows, and than 
 torrents from the Alps. 
 
 Here, then, is the tongue of poetry for him. 
 The child and the poet know it together. They 
 meet, they understand, they have the way of it 
 together. And if they meet again across age and 
 change and disuse, how close, how light, how 
 natural is this encounter, how sudden and how 
 old the intimacy ! Poet and child have their 
 traffic, no doubt, in every life ; but what incom- 
 parable traffic is this of Victor Hugo and an 
 English reader who had a French childhood ! 
 How ingenious is fortune to bring their com- 
 munion to pass ! Many are the things, small and 
 all-important, known fully, and more than known 
 — recognized, known after estrangement — between 
 these two only of all the pairs of poet and child, 
 in the world. Where else can there be just such 
 a commerce ? In the first place that poet is 
 unique. He, too, breathes the breath of the moss 
 closely ; he has not only the child's sense of it, 
 but also the child's inexpert and invaluable word. 
 And the reader, on his part, has, as I have said, 
 a peculiar experience both of memory and of 
 oblivion. For him, then, the French language has 
 that grace of election which makes it wholly, 
 invincibly successful — the grace of each man's 
 first tongue ; and in overplus it has the powers of 
 the tongue in which Victor Hugo was wont to
 
 Poetry and Childhood 113 
 
 write of children, and, again, the powers of the 
 
 tongue of a great romance. Of a word in that 
 
 language, therefore, it may be said, as of the elect 
 
 lady in a violent world — 
 
 Her gentle step to go or come 
 Gains her more merit than a martyrdom. 
 
 The word of poetry in after-life is sublime and 
 tragic by will, by force and conquest; the word, 
 in the French of Hugo, has for me but to be 
 uttered. ' Le verger ' possesses not only a young 
 child's sight of trees under the sun and moon, 
 a young child's touch of the grass, but also the 
 genius of the South of France, of ancient agri- 
 culture and of early song. 
 
 Assuredly those to whom the word first 
 learnt was ' the orchard ' must be content with 
 something less than this. 
 
 A reading of later French persuades one easily 
 that Victor Hugo was alone, and is alone, the 
 speaker of what has become so mysterious and 
 so intelligible, so surcharged and so buoyant a 
 language : 
 
 Oh, 'tis not Spanish, but 'tis Heaven she speaks ! 
 
 cries Crashaw. Victor Hugo speaks not so much 
 French as childhood, and a peculiar childhood ; 
 Romance, and a unique Romance ; nature, too, 
 as no eyes of Latin race had seen it until then, 
 with insight as well as with perception — in Emer- 
 son's phrase, ' a little wildly, or with the flower 
 of the mind '. 
 
 H
 
 H4 Poetry and Childhood 
 
 Apart from all this which makes the lyrics of 
 this great poet so dear, for exclusive and accidental 
 reasons, to one reader among many, I have no 
 praise for the French poetic tongue. It is true 
 that the word ' souffle ' is for my ear all a summer 
 wind at night — it has more merit than a martyrdom 
 of description ; that is by chance. It is by genius, 
 however, that Victor Hugo makes this word so 
 fresh and dark. 
 
 What I have to suggest is that the poets, since 
 he ceased to write (ceased as a lyrist, not as a 
 rhetorician), have done little more for the enlarge- 
 ment of their language than he did in the distant 
 days when his work was a very revolution ; and 
 this in spite of their metrical liberty, which seems 
 to have no bounds. The freedom he claimed from 
 the bonds of the preceding century or so was 
 precisely no more than his art needed. Nothing 
 was done for the sake of liberty, for the sake 
 of others, for the sake of pionccrship, or for 
 any other of the causes that mediocrity is fond of. 
 All was purely for his own poetry, and because, 
 being Victor Hugo, he could not write within the 
 laws that held Boileau content. Where he found 
 no need of change he obeyed Boileau or another, 
 or La Harpe or another, with a cheerful docility 
 that has left his verse to-day far behind the 
 reforms of modern French prosody, ' reforms ' 
 that seem to have been inspired by the revolt of 
 a Walt Whitman, and make easy havoc of the
 
 Poetry and Childhood 115 
 
 whole order, the whole law. Even in the enlarged 
 liberty made for French poetry by Victor Hugo's 
 advance, the wave of verse met salutary bars and 
 measures as strong as rocks. But his successors 
 have spilt their art thinly over all boundaries, and 
 the flat country is already under shallow water. 
 
 I have under my hand the volume of a little 
 recent symbolist, side by side with Les Voix 
 Intirieures, and the comparison persuades me that 
 not all this new licence is able to make the French 
 language a really liberal instrument. What has 
 been written here must be the proof that if I have 
 a prejudice it is for French, and that for me 
 magic and the caprice of destiny are on that side. 
 But there are disabilities ; and it is not metrical 
 liberty, or the chance medley of masculine and 
 feminine endings, or the ignoring of the e mute, 
 or rhymes that arc but the suggestion of a jingle, 
 or any other of these later liberties that can make 
 this language sufficient. It lacks the second part, 
 the other side, the splendour of alternative. It 
 has the strangest blanks. It cannot so much as 
 call an author shallow, nor a teacup, nor a sea. 
 
 As it has no alternative of derivation, French 
 has none of time ; no place apart for poems and 
 prayers, but the whole language is at the disposal of 
 the daily grocer and the trade-circular. The French 
 of commerce, merely exaggerated, has tempted poets 
 to make that ready eloquence resound, when the 
 lyric could do no more, for lack of strings. 
 
 11 2
 
 n6 
 
 Poetry and Childhood 
 
 A word as to syllables — those great units of 
 verse — and their motions. The Italian syllables 
 dance, springing from their double consonants and 
 long vowels ; the English walk, with all variety 
 of gait, and fly with all variety of wing ; the 
 French trot. ' £galisez les syllabes.' The French- 
 man who speaks right Parisian equalizes the 
 syllables not only of his own language but of every 
 other. Hear him speak Italian thus ; hear him, 
 as a good pastor in England, read the English 
 Testament.
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 If the novel has been raised to the highest place 
 in literature in our time, this was mainly by the 
 power of one hand. Victor Hugo had not the in- 
 tellect, nor Flaubert the purpose, nor George Eliot 
 the drama, nor Thackeray the tolerance, that in 
 union could achieve such an exaltation of an art 
 that was once pastime. Fiction was made by 
 Meredith for his generation the companion of 
 poetry, and thus the second great imaginative art 
 of letters. The picaresque novel, the novel of irony, 
 the novel of invention, the novel of morals, the 
 novel of emotion — the work of Le Sage, Cervantes, 
 Balzac, Charlotte Bronte — works of genius as they 
 are, take an intermediate, arbitrary, and partial 
 place ; they are on the way to the work of intellect 
 and philosophy in fiction, the novel that watches 
 life, perceives, detects, indeed, but has also the 
 spiritual insight, wisdom as well as knowledge, and 
 not only temperament but passion ; that not only 
 states the problem, but accounts for it. 
 
 George Meredith did not pause upon his know- 
 ledge of the human heart as though knowledge in 
 itself were a good, he used his science ; nor did he 
 stop upon his emotion over the pain of life, he used 
 his sympathy. He worked much beyond and far 
 above the regions in which the wrangle about art
 
 n8 George Meredith 
 
 with a purpose or art without a purpose goes for- 
 ward. No critic will ever impugn Meredith's 
 transcendent purpose. It is not possible to imagine 
 his prose or poetry without it. 
 
 The greatness of Meredith stands unquestionable 
 even in the eyes of those who think it incomplete. 
 Great he was — in thought, in passion, in the art of 
 letters, a student of mankind who sought to help, 
 without consoling, the race he watched, suffering 
 and hoping with that which he studied, as a physi- 
 cian pressing a finger upon a brother's wrist, caring 
 much for the pulse, for the blood, and for the man's 
 life, caring also much for his own science. The 
 incompleteness which so many readers charged 
 against his work is perhaps that it lacks the great 
 and high repose of art which is unconscious of 
 appearances. A great author should be anxious for 
 effect, or the result of his phrase upon the educated 
 ear, but he should be lifted above anxiety for appear- 
 ances or the result of his phrase upon the untaught. 
 Meredith's prose has not this loftiness, and there- 
 fore misses the classic simplicity. He must be 
 afraid of nothing who writes at the greatest heights, 
 and Meredith feared commonplace. Strange fear 
 for so distinguished a mind ! But the fear is un- 
 mistakable. It appears most plainly in narrative. 
 He will not consent to employ the usual forthright 
 order of words in telling what happened. Even in 
 recounting the order of dialogue, he can hardly 
 bear to use the customary ' he said ' — he prefers 
 x she heard '. This perpetual kind of device mars
 
 George Meredith 119 
 
 the manner of his work only in so far as a fine style 
 can be marred by a little manner, and that is not 
 very far. Generally when we find such a weakness 
 of fear and human respect in literature, it is the 
 companion of a weakness of the whole man — or at 
 any rate of the whole author. But when a great 
 man suffers from this frailty, we gladly recognize 
 the truth that style is a profound thing that cannot 
 gravely suffer from surface habits. Meredith's 
 style is at the foundation of his literature. It has 
 often been said of some author that he has little 
 intellect or power but a good style of writing. Of 
 Meredith we might almost say that he has a magnifi- 
 cent style, yet writes but ill, wild as the paradox 
 may sound. Everything worthy to be called style 
 is his, but the phrase is often tormented, racked, 
 and bent. No other man's writing could keep its 
 strength, its gravity, and its beauty under such 
 a strain. In poetry, where inversion of one kind 
 or another is, by a long convention, in its right 
 home, Meredith's fault of manner is the use of 
 words so strange as to be unknown, but this occurs 
 in none but the later poems. Difficulty in attaining 
 to the full meaning is too great in both the earlier 
 and the later poems, and in the slighter pieces the 
 fancy is too perversely fanciful. A great imagina- 
 tion is Meredith's, but a quibbling fancy. 
 
 When Matthew Arnold called poetry a criticism 
 of life, the phrase was taken away from the novel, 
 to which it should belong. Philosophic novelists 
 (there have not been many in the history of English
 
 120 George Meredith 
 
 letters) are the chief critics of human life — social 
 life, civilized life, the life of the race and of races, 
 and that of a man and a woman ; even a great 
 novelist who is not a philosopher — Thackeray, for 
 example — is a critic of life in its ethics, its emotions, 
 and its shows ; the novelist who is a humorist 
 does his admirable part of criticism. But Meiedith 
 in his day took the whole social man into his grasp 
 and his vision. A mere user of his arresting hand 
 and of his searching eyes Meredith was not ; he 
 bent all the powers of a vigilant mind and of a 
 human heart upon the study of character. The 
 study was also the creation. Meredith formed the 
 most possible, the most complex, the most complete 
 and least explicable of women and men, now and 
 then varying these vitally-mingled persons by pre- 
 senting a man who, having one quality only, such 
 as the Egoism of the Egoist, is yet alive with a most 
 indubitable life. George Meredith seldom tells 
 a story of these people — he tells nothing less than 
 their history. What he tells us is so much their 
 history that the error, the sin, or the blunder that 
 draws their fate about them is detected in their 
 youth, traced in their maturity, and finished, early 
 or late, in their doom. No other important student 
 of life, except perhaps George Eliot, has found such 
 visible revenges. He saw them, and he was re- 
 solved to show them. His doctrine of consequences 
 seems to stand between that of the Buddhist with 
 his inevitable body of results, and that of the 
 Christian with his directed and decreed retribution.
 
 George Meredith 121 
 
 Meredith's Avenger is an offended Nature or 
 wronged Reason, working by the force of some un- 
 decreed law ; nevertheless of a law. Undccreed ; 
 and yet Meredith, by figure of language at any rate, 
 attributes to the visiting and avenging Power now 
 something of formidable indignation and now 
 something of formidable indifference ; and even 
 indifference has to be felt ! Even blindness implies 
 an eye capable of sight ! Meredith had a philosophy 
 of Nature which taught him not — as other students 
 of brute life might suppose--a simple and irre- 
 sponsible egoism, but self-denial, self-conquest, 
 and unflinching endurance, lie would have the 
 individual man to learn the almost unlearnable 
 lesson that his own fate is of no importance. 
 Of no importance to the race others have per- 
 ceived and pronounced it; Meredith would have the 
 unit to accept and make his own that interior 
 resignation — if resignation is not too half-hearted 
 a word. All the graver poems too bear this as 
 their principal teaching, and their many lessons 
 rest on this alone. To the apostolate of this doc- 
 trine he dedicated his practice of comedy, as well as 
 his heart of tragedy, and the Comic Spirit has no 
 surer mission than to attack the outworks of that 
 self-love within which lurks the condemned desire 
 for personal happiness. Austere doctrine, compared 
 with which the courage of the Stoic is but shallow 
 in its penetration of the soul, is but sparing in its 
 wounding of the heart.
 
 PESSIMISM IN FICTION 
 
 The told story was not at first used for the pur- 
 poses of pity, terror, and purification, but mainly 
 for fun. Shall we make a great exception of the 
 Book of Job, the inspired novel all occupied with 
 its subject, the history of a single valuable soul ? 
 A family swept out of life are of no moment to that 
 novelist, save as their fate causes the affliction of 
 Job. By and by he shall be comforted with other 
 sons and daughters. These, like the dead ones, are 
 negligible except as sons and daughters to one not 
 negligible man. Never was art truer to a single 
 intention. The carlierfamily have no names named, 
 but the later receive names because they are to go 
 on living for the final joy of a momentous man. 
 
 If we may be permitted (or may be permitted as 
 time goes on) to read Genesis, too, as a divine and 
 all-significant novel, here is an even earlier example 
 of the novel written with the gravest intention, and 
 with simple and economic art. Here the 'stars also ' 
 are swept into being as the sons of Job are swept out 
 of it, in a phrase that does not pause upon the 
 universe that was to live, as the phrase did not 
 pause upon the beautiful young men who were to 
 die. The earth is central for that purpose, and Job 
 for this. 
 
 But leaving aside, as a digression, the case of
 
 Pessimism in Fiction 123 
 
 these divine examples of grave fiction, and that of 
 the parables of the Gospel with them, we find an 
 art of story-telling, whether in Arabia or in Tuscany, 
 devised chiefly or altogether for pastime. It is an 
 art of childish origins — the pretending that such 
 or such things came to pass, the making things 
 come to pass at the speaker's whim. It is an 
 arbitrary make-believe and irresponsible, whereas 
 the drama must, as it were, make good its words by 
 making a show. When the novel began in Italy it 
 raised a childish laugh by jests unchildish. Its 
 stories ended happily even though iniquitously. 
 A mere pastime, it filled none but the idlest hour, 
 or the weariest hour of rest. Boccaccio's fictions 
 were proportionate. There was little of them, and 
 they did not encroach. It is a question whether the 
 habit into which wc in our time have slipped — 
 fiction as a custom and a habit — is proportionate ; 
 and all our modern pastimes are in like manner 
 questionable as to their quantity. And when the 
 pastime of the greater number — the reading of the 
 novel — is charged by the novelist with so many 
 functions as it now carries we cannot but wonder 
 that irresponsible hands should claim, and into 
 those hands should be given, purposes so various 
 and purporting to be so grave. 
 
 It is the novelist, then, with no one to whom he 
 must answer, with no facts to which he must 
 be bound, and with only such truths as he sets in 
 secret before his eyes — it is the novelist at whose
 
 124 Pessimism in Fiction 
 
 discretion lies the power of suggestion that is fol- 
 lowed by a million souls. The idle reader opens the 
 novel for pleasure and learns to find that pleasure 
 in painful things. A pessimist has him by the ear, 
 having captured him at the mischief of his idleness 
 and his desire for passive pleasure. On the pessi- 
 mist author's side also there is some spiritual sloth 
 in his activities, for pessimism is the easier way. 
 If he would confess himself he would tell us that it 
 is so. And one of his fruits is the obvious destruc- 
 tion of comedy, but the other, equally lamentable 
 though less obvious, is the destruction of tragedy. 
 We have all been troubled by Dante's lack of 
 pity for the people of his infernal pilgrimage. It is 
 true that he has compassion upon Francesca (for 
 the dreadful fact is that he had known as ' a little 
 radiant girl ' the very woman whom he saw in 
 eternal woe), but he witnesses unmoved the other 
 wounded displaying before him their immortal 
 wounds and the other miserable recounting to him 
 their immedicable grief. Are we to understand that 
 some misery is beneath living compassion, and that 
 pity and terror do not pass the limits of life's 
 known and intelligible ways, the ways of customary 
 men, where anguish is not cut off from good, and 
 hope, a banished angel, is not abolished ? If so, it 
 is easier to understand why the literature of despair 
 is indeed not tragic, why it denies tragedy as comedy 
 itself does not. If pessimism robs us of laughter 
 it has done worse by ' beguiling us of our tears ',
 
 Pessimism in Fiction 125 
 
 not that for its sake they are, but that they are 
 not, shed. 
 
 It is no wonder that the proffer of Browning*s 
 optimism, half-heartedly made again on the day of 
 his centenary, did again fail His 'All 's right with 
 the world ' is as vain as the pessimist's ' All 's wrong 
 with it '. It is out of the range of customary life. 
 Intelligible joy and grief are in the midways, and 
 in the midways there is cause for as much sadness 
 as our human hearts can hold. One of the most 
 heart-piercing lines in our poetry is Patmore's 
 
 After exceeding ill a little good. 
 
 But if the ill had so exceeded that the little good 
 was not, the pierced heart would have closed upon 
 an insensible cicatrice. 
 
 Perhaps, by the way, another reason why Brown- 
 ing's remedies are proffered in vain is his denial of 
 fear. Browning refused to submit to fear, at once 
 the penalty and the duty of mankind. Pessimists, 
 on the other hand, are afraid, and they and Brown- 
 ing do not understand one another in their oppo- 
 sition, they are not intelligible enemies. Our 
 pessimists fear, not without cause, and Browning 
 is vociferously hopeful, without full cause. The 
 antagonists are not within touch. And yet that 
 robustious poet is held, or was held by his own 
 generation, to be a realist. In certain evil things 
 he was, on the contrary, an idealist. Having never 
 known such a Spanish friar, or such a Bishop
 
 126 Pessimism in Fiction 
 
 Blougram, he created them before he detected 
 them — and at such close quarters, so point-blank! 
 He was too intimate with the Sludge he made. 
 But the pessimist, though so partial and so im- 
 perfect, is a better realist than he. 
 
 A tragedy the noblest and most dreadful of our 
 time — I refer to Monsieur Paul Claudel's drama, 
 L'OtagC — is the truer antithesis of pessimism in 
 fiction, whether in the story told or on the stage. 
 It is a talc of exceeding ill and a little good, of 
 a world wherewith all is not right. I have lately 
 read a novel in which everything went wrong, and 
 what final solace appears takes the form of a little 
 chatter about a servant's photograph. In Monsieur 
 Claudel's play the solace is in the form of a momen- 
 tary act of divine death after exceeding ill. 
 
 VOtage should be ministered to pessimists, or 
 rather to their readers, for tears, and Mr. Jacobs for 
 laughter. The age is not without its remedies.
 
 GIACINTO GALLINA 
 
 When Giacinto Gallina died at the end of the 
 nineteenth century, at the moment of the high tide 
 of his work for the Venetian stage, English people 
 were put into possession of some idea of his drama 
 in the readiest way at hand. Gallina was said to 
 be, more or less, a later Goldoni with a warmer 
 heart. This was a brief description — or rather 
 a mere sign— of an author whom few strangers 
 would ever seek to know better. He is, indeed, so 
 barred out of the knowledge of English readers by 
 his frequent use of dialect that some such phrase 
 was necessary as a first and final memoire. It gave 
 the news of his death with a first mention of his 
 name and a compendious definition of his career, 
 in one sentence. 
 
 Gallina certainly followed Goldoni in finding the 
 arguments, action, and passions of his plays in the 
 home life of the Venetians — a life more domestic 
 than anything an English dramatist would have 
 the courage to offer to a self-conscious public in- 
 clined to ' humour '. Although our countrymen 
 are much afraid lest men should accuse them of 
 exceeding domesticity, and are inclined to defend 
 themselves with irony, they are in fact less domestic 
 than any of their neighbours. You may hear two 
 young Italian men, of what would be called among
 
 128 Giacinto Gallina 
 
 ourselves with some pride the frivolous world, 
 exchange reports of the state and progress of their 
 children (their babies really, but one hardly dares 
 to say so ; and one s reluctance denotes the 
 peculiar insular sense of dignities and indignities, 
 the reserve, and the clowning that covers its hasty 
 retreat). One hesitates, for fear of burlesque, to 
 report in English a conversation that is in Italy 
 quite simple, human, and unconnected with any 
 kind of raillery. 
 
 If this almost majestic candour is found in ' the 
 world ', the home is at least equally important in 
 the classes whereof Goldoni chiefly wrote, and Gia- 
 cinto Gallina in succession to him. These middle 
 classes are very homely, and also peculiarly Italian. 
 Nothing quite so local is to be found among the 
 very poor, whose customs are those of necessity all 
 the world over, and whose manners are small ; the 
 rich also tend to resemble each other, luxury grows 
 monotonous, and cookery, for example, is as French 
 in a good hotel in Athens as in a good hotel in Rome. 
 But the little professional world everywhere in 
 Italy keeps deep and inner places wherein it is 
 Italian, Italian beyond the ken of the traveller, and 
 beyond the reach of alteration. The same thing 
 that makes so much of Goldoni and of Gallina 
 illegible to the rest of Europe encloses that seques- 
 tered home, and this is dialect. Business, especially 
 if it be official, the business of an impiegato, is done in 
 choice Italian, and all acquaintance with foreigners
 
 Giacinto Gallina 129 
 
 (which in these classes is not much) uses the 
 same polite manner of speech. ' Toscaneggia ' — 
 ' he tuscanizes ' — says one provincial of another, 
 bantering the choice of words and the careful con- 
 jugations of verbs which he himself also will put on 
 with the dignities of office. 
 
 But within the flat, within the palazzo, within 
 the country villino alike, dialect has its nest of 
 intimacy, and makes all speech homely with an 
 intensity of homeliness that people without patois 
 can hardly conceive. It sets up an understanding, 
 it runs up a code of signals, it makes confidence, 
 and is heard in a laugh. Habit has not blunted the 
 people's sense of their locality of speech, even as it 
 has left them the full consciousness of their sun. 
 The barbarisms of local dialect are to the Italian 
 citizens snug (as Swift would say) beyond descrip- 
 tion : their speech closes in their gossip, it prompts 
 their allusions, it interprets, it understands, at close 
 quarters. It is a kind of refuge from the generalities 
 of literature ; it consoles the heart from the threats 
 of the preacher. But it scolds as no other kind of 
 language can scold : scolds the servants with an 
 equality of expression and a tyranny of oppression 
 together that makes one of the curiosities of Italian 
 domestic life; it scolds with the peculiar fury of the 
 southern kitchen — a fury that casts itself implicitly 
 upon the fellow-feeling of bystanders for excuse 
 in the future time of calm. Dialect, in fine, sus- 
 tains, comforts, winks, excludes the burden of the 
 
 1
 
 130 Giacinto Gallina 
 
 unintelligible world, deprecates, assuages; it keeps 
 up the old, old habits of childhood, it knows the 
 things that the citizen and the citizen's wife know 
 best, it is aloof from politics. 
 
 Inasmuch as the little professional classes of the 
 South do not live without society, their dialect 
 associates them closely with their neighbours — 
 closely yet without any defect of ceremony. The 
 rites are as many, the farewells are as repeated, 
 as though Tuscan were the language ; and the 
 speakers of a comparatively gross dialect, full of 
 twang, are yet not people to spend their evenings 
 in ungraceful isolation. Their domesticity is not 
 of the English kind that is made by the habit of 
 reading, and dialect dispenses them from none of 
 the duties and dignities of entertainment. It is 
 only that all is done within, within certain bonds 
 of concentrated mutual understanding. 
 
 Indeed, the necessity of companionship for every 
 evening causes a very courteous waiving of the 
 differences of rank. The general asks the village 
 druggist (who is also the barber), and all others of 
 like condition, to his country house to play tombola, 
 there being no other neighbours, or but few. The 
 intercourse between them is that of perfectly equal 
 and easy courtesy, the only sign of difference being 
 the use of the address ' eccellenza ' on one side only, 
 but with the infrequence of natural good manners. 
 Without dialect you could hardly have an under- 
 standing so close yet so decorous.
 
 Giacinto Gallina 131 
 
 Even a remote dialect serves this intimate pur- 
 pose. It was my fortune to know in childhood the 
 inner interior of such a house. Genoese was my 
 own tongue, and the barber's, and all the country- 
 side's, and the General's was Modenese. His 
 Modenese and his wife's had never abated a jot, for 
 all their many years of dwelling in Liguria ; as 
 for their Italian, it was singularly exquisite (the 
 General's recitation of Dante was the most perfect 
 speech in the world), but it was not forthcoming for 
 their tombola parties. Modenese met the quite 
 alien Genoese in a kind of rivalry of historic provin- 
 cialism. Hosts and guests understood each other 
 barely, and the hard Modenese consonants snapped 
 in reply to the Ligurian sing-song ; but it was at 
 any rate dialect, it was not altri, it was the strong 
 Italian home. 
 
 That the women should have their interests in 
 these narrow things — narrow but not dull — is in- 
 telligible enough. Many of the older women remain 
 indoors from Sunday noon to the next Sunday 
 morning, in a jacket and slippers ; not a few of the 
 younger have their distractions, romances, emotions, 
 at the window. Poverty, moreover, fosters these 
 customs by forbidding much toilette, and thus 
 the Italian woman of these middle classes, and of 
 remote towns, who always dresses much, is content 
 to dress seldom, and this perforce means a habit of 
 home-keeping. But the men, with the slight 
 alternative of the caffe, are equally absorbed by the 
 
 1 2
 
 132 Giacinto Gallina 
 
 things of the house. So does Goldoni show them to 
 be in the whole series of his plays, and so must the 
 men of his audience have been in the eighteenth 
 century, or they would not have endured this per- 
 petual comedy of domestic affairs, in the least 
 exalted sense of the word domestic. Venetian men, 
 and the citizens of other cities equally noble, sat to 
 see the play that turns chiefly on the strife of 
 a man's mother and his wife for the services of 
 a single maid, and they sit to-day to see the same 
 thing. Giacinto Gallina, too, has half a comedy 
 occupied with that contention. He need hardly — 
 but for its unflagging popularity — have taken the 
 self-same motive, inasmuch as Goldoni is by no 
 means out of date ; he holds the stage as freshly as 
 ever. Indeed, Italian women, except in the richer 
 classes that have international examples more 
 constantly before their eyes, alter little in a matter 
 of a hundred or two hundred years. In the women 
 of Goldoni and in the women of Giacinto Gallina 
 you may see the virtual contemporaries of Mrs. 
 Samuel Pepys and of Mercer.
 
 THE SECOND PERSON SINGULAR 
 
 The cause of the modern monotony of ' you ' 
 might be sought in the mere slovenliness of our 
 civilization in the practice of the inflexions of 
 grammar. All things tend to become specialized, 
 except only words. Though in the house of life 
 itself the organs, as life grows more perfect, begin to 
 draw apart to their own separate functions; though 
 the labourer, in the later association of mankind, 
 finds his task by degrees to dwindle in range and 
 to be enforced within closer and closer repetitions ; 
 and though only a small division of any of the 
 sciences that have come towards adult and 
 responsible age falls to the share of a single 
 specialist, the word alone grows not expert and 
 special, but general and inexpert. 
 
 It is obliged to do more various things, and to 
 do them with less directness and, as it were, a less 
 sequestered intention. It is engaged upon enter- 
 prises of unskilled labour. The industrial word 
 has less and less craft, less dignity, less leisure, 
 less rest, and more mere utility. 
 
 Moreover, it loses, in the workaday life, its 
 own varieties, amid the varieties of the casual task. 
 It changes not its vesture, and the inflexion is lost. 
 
 Why it is that some, at least, of the civilized 
 peoples, in the inevitable evolution of things,
 
 134 The Second Person Singular 
 
 should tend to become poor, careless, and inexact 
 grammarians it is hard to understand. The fact 
 is, needless to say, well enough known. Some of 
 the French missionaries, students of American- 
 Indian languages, have astonished us with reports 
 of the enormous vocabularies and the scientific 
 order of those tongues. The people arc in the 
 nomadic stage of society, their languages in the 
 finished, the special, the sub-divided condition ; 
 intricate in system, organic, arranged, logical, full 
 of expressive differences, cases that precisely 
 assign action, and tenses that deal finely with time, 
 turning the future to look upon the past, and 
 anticipating that turn, and making a shifting 
 perspective of the past ; distinguishing persons 
 not merely by pointing the rude forefinger of 
 a pronoun, but by the allusion of all the inflexions 
 of a verb. All that the antique grammars did, 
 and more, is done, we hear, by those doomed 
 languages of an unaltering people, a people with 
 neither literature nor history, a people whose 
 antiquities have no interest nor value, nor date, 
 because their centuries resembled each other. 
 
 Not only the tactics of grammar, but an 
 innumerable variety of words is theirs, so that 
 a speaker might hardly name a common thing 
 without a conscious play of choice, according as 
 the syllables of a sentence were to fold and close. 
 Rhythmic prose is hardly possible, when it has 
 the charge of thought, without some degree of
 
 The Second Person Singular 135 
 
 a like liberty of choice, and modern prose in all 
 languages has, obviously, for the lack of this 
 liberty — for lack of rich alternatives — somewhat 
 forgone the practice of rhythm ; forgone it 
 altogether in the explanations of science, for 
 instance, or the processes of reasoning. A Red- 
 Indian speech, translated even into sentimental 
 English, as used formerly to be done, must have 
 undergone a sorry process, and a yet sorrier 
 change when it was done into sentimental French. 
 It is, however, among English races chiefly that 
 an unwillingness to be troubled with the distinc- 
 tions of grammar has had this effect of making 
 a word run errands and serve the first purpose at 
 hand ; and it is among English races that inflexions 
 (never very numerous or subtle) have been 
 neglected and let fall. That most orderly of 
 grammars, the Spanish, is still in full use ; the 
 Italians keep all their inflexions nominally, use 
 them all in Tuscany, use a certain number in 
 Rome, retain as few as possible in Liguria — making 
 shift with auxiliary verbs rather than conjugate 
 properly, everywhere except in the Tuscan districts. 
 The French go about to avoid certain of their own 
 subjunctives, even in literature, and in speech the 
 perfect tenses are passed askance, for fear of 
 pedantry. None but ourselves have been so im- 
 patient as to put out of common use the second 
 person singular. ' You ' was manifestly a trick 
 of politeness in all languages, until it became
 
 136 The Second Person Singular 
 
 depreciated by general use, when Germans, 
 Spaniards, and Italians sought for a yet more 
 distant pronoun of courtesy. 
 
 The literary Genius was kind to its wayward 
 chosen people, and kept for us a plot of the 
 language apart for the phrase of piety and poetry. 
 As things are, we need not envy the French their 
 second person singular. For them it has but 
 two keen significances — the first use in love and 
 the disuse in the reproof of children. The second 
 is, perhaps, the more important ; it is renewed, 
 and loses nothing of its pain by recurrence. To 
 say ' vous ' to a naughty child is to enforce 
 insatiate retribution ; few children deserve so 
 much justice, for this is a rebuke that touches the 
 personality, and alters the relations of life. 
 
 As to that other occasion, first-mentioned, it is 
 by no means certain that the second person 
 singular, with its single delight — the first — never 
 to be renewed, has not to answer for the vulgar 
 regrets of the world for the flights of its joys. 
 ' Toi ', the first ' toi ', is an arbitrary, a conven- 
 tional happiness, a happiness because it is single — 
 it has no quality but that. The ' many thousand ' 
 of ' toi ' are insignificant, and therefore it has no 
 ' poor last ' ; it sets a paltry example, therefore. 
 
 And then, while the second person singular 
 plays this ambiguous part in love, see how primly 
 it is eschewed in prayer. ' May your name be 
 sanctified ' is a second phrase of the oraison
 
 The Second Person Singular 137 
 
 dominie ale [oraison dominicale I the name says 
 everything) which we should be loth to have 
 in place of our own. With us there is not only the 
 poetic ' thy ', but the obsolete valuing of the last 
 syllable of the past participle — ' hallowed ' — and the 
 unworn, the still fresh word itself to make the 
 sentence beautiful. Decidedly, if we took such 
 words into familiar use we should gain much, but 
 we should lose a most distinctive characteristic, 
 bestowed upon us by the literary Genius, as 
 though in reward of our very sins — our unique 
 plot of disregarded language that the traffic of the 
 world passes by. For though the Italians have 
 a poetic Italian, the differences of this with their 
 daily prose are rather in the form of the words 
 than in the words themselves. Now the French 
 have the Psalms of David in the language of the 
 trade circular charged with a little rhetoric. 
 
 As to our civilized sloth in neglecting rules, and 
 its effectual influence in effacing them, it could 
 not be more distinctly proved than by the Quaker 
 speech. Restoring the second person singular to 
 the language (by way of denying the primitive 
 hyperbole of courtesy from which the general 
 second person plural took its use), the followers of 
 Penn restored none of the inflexions. Or if for 
 a generation or so these were in practice, yet the 
 increase of carelessness and the generalizing habit 
 of speech in a world more and more intent upon 
 special tasks in all things else, quickly made an
 
 138 The Second Person Singular 
 
 end of them. So that Quakerism began to talk 
 a horrible grammar unknown to the Gentiles. If 
 Mrs. Beecher Stowe makes Quakers speak according 
 to their use, they suppressed ' thou ' more or less, 
 and would neither decline nor conjugate. Nothing 
 but the slovenly indifference that has made all our 
 verbs so dull could be the cause of this perversion 
 of a reform. 
 
 Like to the Quaker grammarians are certain of 
 our own poets, who seem to find a difficulty in 
 carrying the second person singular safely through 
 a stanza. If one verb agrees in order, ten to one 
 there is another, a little more out of sight, that 
 does not. As Shelley wrote — 
 
 Thou lovest, but ne'er knew love's sad satiety, 
 
 so write others of the moderns. 
 
 Nevertheless, it is not excusable. It was not 
 done in the other centuries. Must we needs, as 
 we go on, grow so lax, and do these unhandsome 
 things ? If we do by some obscure process grow 
 so lax, why should there not be, in a time of 
 revisions, a revision of these customs ? A little 
 of the subjunctive was restored many years ago 
 by Mr. Henley in the National Observer ; that this 
 little soon fell aside again is not encouraging ; 
 nevertheless, ' it were ' worth while for some 
 author, unencouraged, to recall, responsibly, the 
 second person singular, and with it certain tenses 
 long out of use.
 
 The Second Person Singular 139 
 
 There might be such a literary restoration — 
 a literary and a familiar restoration — as would 
 make our language again more various and more 
 charming, and yet would not turn the speech 
 poetic to vulgar use, nor decrease the dignity of 
 what Jeremy Taylor at his prayers called ' the 
 essential and ornamental measures of address '. 
 
 Whatever our slovenly ways with ordinary 
 grammar, we have the treasure of the sequestered 
 poetic and religious language in good order and 
 perfect syntax. And our advantage of the two 
 derivations may well be dwelt upon afresh, now 
 when so many of our writers are obsequious to 
 the French language. (How is it, by the way, 
 that Ireland is so little joyful for the gift of 
 English?) French cannot be the great poetic 
 language, in spite of the opinion of Louis Blanc, 
 delivered from a grandfatherly hearth-rug : ' L' an- 
 glais et le frangais ; ce sont les deux langues qui 
 resteront ; l'anglais pour le commerce, le frangais 
 pour la litterature.' The blood of a silent listener 
 was only ten years old, but it boiled. And here 
 is a less arrogant but quite characteristic French 
 judgement upon Browning : ' What a singular 
 man ! his middle is not in the centre.' That 
 Frenchman discovered a racial fact. The middle 
 of an English poet is not in the centre ; it is one 
 focus of an ellipse, like the sun. Our national 
 imagination takes wide adventures and unequal 
 velocities. It was once thought (before Kepler)
 
 140 The Second Person Singular 
 
 that the earth's orbit must be circular, because 
 a circle is ' perfect '. And this is the kind of 
 perfection, in another region of thoughts, that the 
 French mind has long cherished. 
 
 Not only in this matter of middles and centres 
 is English poetry out of bounds. She does not 
 know when she is beaten, as was said of English 
 armies. Excluded by rules, how does she elbow 
 her way in ? Into great drama she intrudes, 
 bidding the stage to wait ; by lyre and song she 
 commands epic narrative to halt the marching 
 columns of its processions ; waves rhetoric from 
 its right throne in the grand style and in heroic 
 verse, and usurps its place by an imperial super- 
 session ; scatters literary boundaries, and makes 
 all the kingdoms hers — Poetry's. And no imagin- 
 able academies could have prevailed against her. 
 
 French lacks much besides those alien powers, 
 our Latin and Teutonic inheritances, forbidden as 
 it is to thunder from opposite heavens, with the 
 Danube between, or the Alps between. 
 
 It lacks also negatives worth having ; making 
 shift with half-hearted particles or the grotesquely 
 insufficient peu. Peu is the only negative for 
 some of the most energetic adjectives. Meanwhile 
 we have our profound and powerful particle, in 
 our ' undone', ' unloved ' ' unforgiven ', the ' un ' 
 that summons in order that it may banish, and 
 keeps the living word present to hear sentence 
 and denial, showing the word ' unloved ' to be 
 not less than archangel ruined.
 
 PRINTED IN ENGLAND 
 
 AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 BY FREDERICK HALL
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 POEMS : By Alice Meynell. With 
 
 a portrait by J. S. Sargent, R.A. 7s. 6d. 
 
 ' What makes these poems singular amid all the poems 
 of to-day is the fact that mind and spirit, intellect and 
 imagination, mortal and immortal, have equal parts in 
 them.' — New Statesman. 
 
 1 It is the peculiar characteristic of Mrs. Meynell's poetry 
 that it is itself creative. Its grace and beauty are the 
 flower, not only of her life, but of her contemplation of 
 life. Her books have taken their chosen, quiet, unfaltering 
 way — too loft}' a way for ease or weariness or absent- 
 mindedness to follow. She is sure.' — The Times. 
 
 ' Mrs. Meynell found herself long ago, and was found by 
 all English-speaking lovers of poetry.' — 
 
 Manchester Guardian. 
 
 ESSAYS : By Alice Meynell. Selected 
 
 and arranged from her previously published books. 
 7s. 6d. net. 
 
 'One of the very rarest products of nature and grace — 
 a woman of genius, one who, I am bound to confess, has 
 falsified the assertion I made some time ago that no female 
 writer of our time has attained to true " distinction ".' — 
 Coventry Patmore in the Fortnightly Review. 
 
 'Thewritingis limpid in itsdepths.' — George Meredith. 
 
 ' Exercises in close thinking and expert expression 
 almost unique in the literature of the day.' — Athenaeum. 
 
 ' The most stimulating Essays that have appeared since 
 Mr. Stevenson delighted us with his Virginibus Puerisque. 
 To appreciate them is a step forward in education.' — 
 
 The Guardian. 
 
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 Alice Meynej 
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